Absolute Magnitude
by Evil Is A Relative Term
Summary: Home is where the heart is and Shepard left hers in the ruins of Mindoir. Ruthlessly intelligent, eminently practical, and highly adaptable, she's poised to save the galaxy, even if she feels she no longer has anyone to save it for. From the fields of Eden Prime to a guerrilla war that spans a galaxy, from an XO of the Alliance to an Admiral who answers only to the Reaper threat.
1. Prologue

A/N: Well, here it is, my foray into Mass Effect fanfic. Written with the assistance of Ghostdragon31, who sacrificed a good fifteen minutes of his life untangling how you serve under a Major Kyle at Torfan (Marines) and are Anderson's XO as Commander Shepard (Navy).

Absolute Magnitude

Prologue

Her parents named her Amity.

They'd thought it was a good name, a very Mindoirian sort of name. Full of promise and optimism for a better way, a kinder way.

She wondered sometimes, when she let her hands and mind fall idle, what they would make of their daughter being known throughout the traverse as the Butcher of Torfan. She never lets herself reflect on what they might have thought of her if they'd known the epithet didn't even sting. Even when she had lost everything but memories of that place, millions of light years from "home," there were still things she wanted to cling to.

That she was someone still capable of receiving a parent's love was one of those things.

Mindoir would always shape her, no matter how fast or far she flew.

Like many of the settlements in the furthest reaches of the Attican Traverse-in echo of ancient patterns of human migration and diffusion as populations grew, peaked, splintered-Mindoir had been a tight-knit community formed around a shared set of values. Government sponsored rather than corporation controlled, they'd fulfilled their primary mandate of putting enough people on the ground for the Systems Alliance to claim the territory. And once that was done, they settled in to live life as they saw fit, far from the congested urbanized colonies that formed the core of Alliance space.

Primarily agrarian on too small a scale to be commercial, population limited enough to operate effectively under town hall doctrine, cohesively religious in a way that most of the population felt limited how 'metropolitan' humanity was considered in the galaxy at large. That was the Mindoir she had known.

And it was young enough yet for those values to stand unchallenged, because the greatest part of the population had chosen to come to Mindoir, hadn't happened to simply be born there and have to bear those beliefs like an ill-fitting coat.

Crime was negligible, the workload tolerable, and their protections laughable.

But the last wasn't something they'd thought of in those earliest days of her memory. They'd known, been advised, that they abutted the Terminus systems. And they knew that those systems were full of all sorts of ungodliness, but those things weren't on Mindoir.

Until they were.

She'd been sixteen. Amity had grown up respecting the fruits of hard labor, had been a budding naturalist with an excellent memory for the plants and animals of her homeworld, and she'd had a steadfast belief that with enough effort, good things came to good people.

While her colony burned and her friends, relatives, family were branded like cattle and implanted with control chips like something lower than that, she'd put the first and the second to use. She'd escaped, run, faded into the forests beyond the fields with a woodcraft honed by that childhood where she'd just hoped to avoid startling pretty birds.

Even when she'd shipped out to boot, she'd never known fear like those long, grueling days, waiting and praying for someone to come. Amity hadn't appreciated that advantage then, could only now with distance and perspective see that she'd undergone her own hell week years earlier than her fellow cadets.

Amity knew that she'd have been dead or worse if she'd stayed, but the guilt of surviving alone had been terrible. Even after the SSV Einstein had intervened and she'd been light years from the colony, she'd spent so many nights awake and spent so days in a waking dream of what-she could-have-done that she'd eventually collapsed, prompting a very frank, very painful discussion with a counselor. She'd learned to divorce herself from the guilt, to compartmentalize, to build that very necessary wall that would kept her emotions safely in check and would contribute to making her a terribly effective operative.

At sixteen, she hadn't lost her belief in God. But she'd learned a little about how vast the universe was, how small her place was in it, how indifferent it was to the fortunes of the 'good' and the 'bad'.

It was at sixteen, raging and miserable and so very lost, she'd come to understand what free will _meant_. It meant that all the prayer and faith in the world wouldn't stop other beings from exercising it as they pleased. That was best done with a hyper-velocity bullet. For her own sake, for Mindoir's sake, for all the Mindoirs that might come, she couldn't be satisfied to think that all those terrible things were someone else's problem.

All her plans had dissipated in the smoke of her colony and Amity turned her face from growing things to killing them, her study of plants becoming a study of peoples.

Mindoir hadn't concerned itself with the world outside its atmosphere, had hardly concerned itself with Earth, and she'd seen what that brought them. So for the two long years she'd waited to enlist, she'd spent her time patiently, methodically exploring the extranet until she was a reasonably well-educated xenoanthropologist. She'd read not only what humans had to say about aliens-both the peer-reviewed articles that took her days to trudge through and the forums that sparked incredulous laughter-but what aliens had to say about themselves.

Her sources were limited of course, especially in translation, but she'd painstaking taught herself the written form of the turian language. As the soldiers of the galaxy, it was they who'd written about people as she wanted to know them. Much later, she'd do the same for the salarians and the asari.

The turians didn't like batarians either, which made her predisposed to like them, despite the Relay 314 Incident. From the descriptions of the Rachni Wars, which generated almost as much data on the extranet as the Krogan Rebellions, she'd willingly set 'First Contact War' aside as an inflammatory phrase. Her childhood hadn't prepared her to see Shanxi as anything but a name and Mindoir was present and burning in her mind, not some far-off colony thirteen years surrendered and recaptured.

Boot changed that, a little, gave her more of a sense of that defeat being her own, but she would always be habitually polite. She saw no conflict in saying "please" and pulling the trigger.

The Alliance took her native intelligence, broke her of all impatience, and trained her as an infiltrator.

They made her _Shepard._

And she was _very_ good at it. There were no doors that did not open for her, both literally and figuratively.

When she proved repeatedly to be the most able marksman in her class and then her battalion, they did her the singular honor of training her as a sniper. No longer part of the fire teams that formed the core of every maneuver, Shepard was instead attached the squad as a whole. Shepard and her spotter, a women who was one of the most brilliant mathematical minds she'd ever encountered outside an engineering specialization.

For a colonist from a pacifist world-or any world really, but they'd driven that one home-she'd torn through the enlisted ranks and earned her commission before most soldiers made Corporal.

Her former spotter-now Sergeant Hanson, out of Sathur, survived by her fiancé-died on Torfan. Some days, she felt as if everyone had died on Torfan. Even now, years later, she didn't quite know how she'd come to be the lynchpin of that massacre. Not when they'd had a higher-ranking CO on the ground, who by all rights should have taken the credit and the blame. But when the bodies started falling, someone had to rally the remainder. Major Kyle either couldn't or didn't. She'd never spoken to him to ask, even before his discharge.

Shepard had never been very good at sitting back and dying. Once, she'd run away. Now she ran into the thick of things, did the job she'd been trained to do.

It was one of the largest ground operations she'd ever taken part in, let alone participated in as an officer. Her specialization meant she'd never spent much time in the trenches with the grunts that formed the backbone of their military strength. She was too much of an investment on the part of the Systems Alliance Marine Corps for that.

Close combat was eliminating onlookers or unlucky guards with brutal hand-to-hand or silenced pistols, not dozens of batarian mercenaries who by dint of being batarian and therefore slavers were well-prepped for raids. Whether by Systems Alliance Marines or the competition didn't matter much to them.

Battles of attrition were ugly things, made far worse by bad intel. They'd had causalities, too many causalities. So when the batarians had begun to surrender, she wasn't about to risk her remaining men on taking that surrender on good faith. They didn't have the manpower to take prisoners, so she'd shot the first batarian who'd emerged with his hands up, palms empty. And her men-angry, obedient-had followed her order.

She'd regretted the Marines who'd died. But she'd felt no remorse for the batarians, not at the inquiry that followed, not when Major Kyle had received an honorable discharge because he couldn't bear the weight of it. Shepard was not charged with war crimes, despite some public pressure among the batarians and among some humans, because the Hegemony had insisted beforehand that there'd been no such mercenaries operating in that sector. You could not be charged with the massacre of people who did not exist.

Shepard might not have particularly broad shoulders, but she didn't flinch against the public outcry.

Because behind that wall in her mind, Mindoir was always burning.

_x_

In the fallout of Torfan, Shepard was selected for the N-program, which meant that she officially belonged to the Navy as part of their Special Forces. She would never make Major and instead once again bore the rank of Lieutenant, which was faintly irksome after all the effort to earn her Captain's bars. But if she'd lost men on Torfan, she'd lost none of her talent or drive. Promotions came quick and steady, until she was Commander Shepard, who'd directed as many black-ops missions as she had ones without sealed files and was the go-to girl when the Alliance had an impossible mission it couldn't afford to fail.

When she was assigned to the _Normandy_ , she'd had killed a great many aliens without working closely with any of them. No matter their current campaign for representation on the Council, humanity was somewhat isolationist on the whole and she'd always taken postings far from the hub worlds where the species mingled. She was not interested in being a set of dress blues on display at the Citadel-even if she'd still entitled to wear them-would rather spend days in a miserable, drizzling rain on a convenient rise within scope-sight of a batarian mercenary base.

She did not join the armed forces to gawk at asari, no matter how many lines in her file were praise from commanding officers who'd noted her persuasive diplomacy and tried to recommend her for diplomatic functions and commands that would take her out of the field.

(There was a deep-rooted suspicion about asari, regardless, because she did not believe in universal physical attractiveness. She did, however, believe in broad-spectrum pheromones. She was more bemused by her own strange reactions to the sharp, predatory, painted turians whose alien features don't quite hide their resentment of her kind cluttering up their Citadel. They aren't even mammals. But, then again, none of the other sentient races are. She wondered about that, sometimes, if extinction events on her own planet and the changed climate were the only things that prevented her from having scales rather than hair. She didn't talk about God much, because religion is less popular than ever, but she believed in evolution. She just doesn't believe in quite as much evolution as other people. There's no statistical probability equation in the world that can explain the soul.)

But her own preferences had to give way to the Alliance's needs. She'd accepted the order that would take her out of the field with professional composure, no matter how grudgingly she regarded it in the privacy of her mind. There was the faint, niggling thought, _Should have stayed enlisted,_ but while she was fully capable of following orders, she preferred accomplishing mission objectives according to her own sensibilities.

So she boarded the most advanced ship the Alliance fleets had to offer, becoming the executive officer under one Captain Anderson. She'd spent a lot of time in zero-g, but not as personnel. Usually she'd just been payload, being ferried from problem to another. The kind of problems that required an N-7 team and permanently sealed records.

That was what she did, what she was to the Alliance, the special forces equivalent of the omnitool. So she wondered, as she made the rounds of the ship on that first day, what it was she was supposed to do for or about the _Normandy._ With her aboard and Anderson, a legend in his own right, in command, she didn't doubt that there was a mission beyond taking the _Normandy_ for her virgin flight. But as the days dragged by and she settled uncomfortably into her new role, she began to feel the first edges of impatience. It was one thing to wait in pursuit of an objective, another to wait _for_ an objective.

Unlike the rest of the crew, she was actually grateful when the Spectre boarded. With one of the Citadel's Special Tactics and Reconnaissance officers on deck, it became more likely that they were being sent on something more than a shakedown mission and that meant she wasn't being sidelined.

So there was real warmth in her tone as she introduced herself to Nihlus Kryik, swallowing a smile as he offered her the courtesy of a handshake. Human habits were like thresher maw spores-they could root anywhere and many aliens viewed them as just as much of a menace. "Commander Shepard, Systems Alliance Navy. Welcome aboard, Spectre Kryik."

"Commander," he replied, subharmonics thrumming. She noted how elaborate his colony markings were, brilliant white against rust-colored plates.

"Why don't you give him a tour of the ship?" Anderson suggested. "I'm sure he's seen the plans, but it's another thing entirely to see her in person."

"Of course, sir." Shepard glanced back at the turian, curious as whether he carried a rank outside his Spectre status that would give him the clearance to see the _Normandy'_ s plans or if a Spectre's powers were more far-reaching than she'd been briefed. He could demand transport on any ship belonging to a Citadel-allied race, but that gave him access only the public areas of a ship-quarters, mess, the head.

Her knowledge of turian history and culture as it related to warfare didn't make their expressions or subharmonics any less inscrutable in person. The inane thought itching at her brain was that someone needed to fund a study, though she had a suspicion that some salarian somewhere had probably already put together a lexicon.

Their tour began in the bridge and Shepard was careful to introduce the Spectre in such a way as to convey the message that disrespect would not be tolerated. The crew was handpicked, true, but for their practical skills, not necessarily for their circumspection. Joker was a shining example of this, commentary perfectly audible to her dogging them as they made their way toward the commander's station.

Turian hearing was less acute than human hearing, for all that it took in a broader range in the lower Hertz, but the _Normandy_ had been designed acoustically for orders issued from the commander to be clearly audible at the forward stations. And for replies from the forward stations to be just as understandable.

Shepard had no problems with conversation that didn't interfere with the task at hand or Joker's sense of humor, but she did have a problem when he displayed both of them in front of a Council representative.

Nihlus chose not to comment on it. She hoped it was politeness-if it had been her, it would have been more along the lines of accruing evidence. "I thought it was interesting that they preserved the turian bridge design so completely."

Shepard took his conversational cue and spend the next two hours discussing how well Alliance procedure was meshing with turian design sensibilities and she noted his surprise when she asked his opinion on how turians would have made use of the Alliance anologue of the same spaces. For a species obsessed with analyzing their own cultural development, humanity hadn't made a very good public showing of curiosity of the kind that didn't involve dissection.

It shouldn't really come as a surprise that the Council races saw humanity's aggressive expansion as the prelude to the next Krogan Rebellion.

That was her opinion, at least.

Given that, she began to think that perhaps she was slated to be either made an asset or dealt with preemptively, as the next several days saw her with a seven-foot shadow. Nihlus was watching her too closely without engaging her in conversation for it to anything but some sort of evaluation. Irksome, but she ignored him for the most part. The information was obviously need-to-know and likely wouldn't end in her cooling corpse. She'd worked with Anderson before-he was a soldier before he was a politician and wouldn't leave her to the varren for political expediency.

Udina would, and she could respect that, but she wasn't prepared to die just yet. She might have broken records for batarian killcounts if she'd been allowed to claim responsibility for some of those asteroids returned to rock and empty buildings, but there were a lot more bodies waiting for her bullet before the scales of Mindoir were brought into balance.

It was only when they closed on Eden Prime that she discovered just what was afoot. Joker was complaining about Nihlus again, with Alenko trying that soft-spoken, ineffective way to suggest a little professionalism. Alenko might win time-in-service promotions, but unless he learned to manage his human resources more effectively, she didn't see him being tapped for real commands.

Still, at least he wasn't doing it where Spectre Kryik could hear anymore and asking complete professionalism from Joker was a losing battle, so she let it pass.

Nihlus was waiting in the comm room with a view of Eden Prime on the screen, turning to look at her as the hatch hissed open. "Good," he said. "I was hoping you'd arrive first."

She automatically lifted a brow in question and Nihlus had apparently spent enough time with humans to interpret it as exactly that.

"What do you think of our destination?" he asked, mandibles shifting in a way that might have been faintly analogous to her eyebrow lift. "I understand that Eden Prime is something of a symbol for your people."

"I somehow doubt that my opinion of whether it's a symbol of our triumph over our own self-destructive tendencies or simply a sign that space travel has allowed us to defer the suicide of our species through rampant industrial pollution indefinitely is really relevant. Though, given those ugly prefab habitats we tend to use regardless of environment, I'm more in favor of the rampaging virus released into a fresh host population theory."

"...that's a very salarian way of thinking."

"It should be. I'm quoting one. And paraphrasing old arguments between human philosphers."

"Your species' inability to produce a unifying philosophy is very odd."

"Not so odd," she countered. "The turians are clearly an apex predator species, physiologically speaking. Keen eyesight, natural weapons and armor. Your only crippling weakness is an inability to handle low temperatures, which wasn't an issue on your home planet. Humans, on the other hand, survive because we're quick to adapt. We're like our own DNA mutation writ large. With so many different approaches to any problem, at least one will be successful and others are quick to adopt whatever will help them thrive. And those that don't-well, we call it natural selection. You might consider that our unifying philosophy."

Nihlus's green eyes were looking at her as if he'd never seen her before. "I didn't think someone of your reputation would be a philosopher."

"I don't know if I'd go that far. I believe there's a point where thinking has to give way to action. But that's neither here nor there, Spectre."

"I suppose not. I was just surprised. I was expecting a comment on the scenery." His lateral mandibles shifted into something that conveyed amusement. "Somehow, I don't think you've missed the fact that this isn't a simple shakedown mission."

"Those usually don't require a Spectre, experimental stealth technology or no," she agreed, crossing her arms and shifting her weight into something more comfortable. For a member of a highly formalized, military species, Nihlus seemed to conduct himself with a certain lack of ceremony.

"This ship does represent a step forward in turian-human diplomacy, but you're right to say that wouldn't prompt Council intervention. It simply happened to be a convenient excuse."

"For?"

It was Anderson's rich voice that interrupted their conversation. "Retrieval of Prothean tech, discovered by the farmers on Eden Prime."

The part of her that remembered Mindoir didn't consider what they did on Eden Prime farming-there was a certain disgust for the vast commercial farming interests that controlled equally vast tracts of land on selected garden planets and allowed fully urban planets to outsource their need to eat. But that was an old prejudice and, as she'd said to Nihlus about her feelings on Eden Prime, irrelevant.

She didn't know much about the Protheans, except that they had lived in what passed for a mythological age for species that lived a thousand years. But she did know that their detritus was worth a lot of money in the right markets, which would explain why it was a military pick-up and not a research team coming to examine it before it was removed from whatever field they'd found it in.

The only unexpected factor in this was the Council intervention. _What concession were they buying with handing this find over?_ If she'd asked, Anderson might answer that their scientists might discover something that theirs couldn't, but scientific advancements had always been about the acquisition of new knowledge. And she didn't see any of their researchers surrendering something like this gracefully.

"Why was I brought in on this, sir?" she asked instead.

"This is your first shipside command, isn't it?" Anderson remarked. "Most of your assignments have been short-term, small-unit special forces actions. You've built yourself a reputation, Shepard."

Nihlus nodded. "It was Torfan that brought you to our attention," he explained. "Though, now that the Systems Alliance has agreed to open your files for the Council, you were an exemplary Spectre candidate long before that." His mandibles pulled into another sharp approximation of a smile. "So when the Council decided that it might be time to consider appointing a human Spectre, I put you forward."

 _And there was the concession._ It must have been a very good find-a data disk wouldn't have bought a human a place among the Spectres.

"I still don't understand why I was brought aboard the Normandy," Shepard admitted. "You clearly don't need an XO with my background and there are missions better suited to observing my skills. Unless, of course, what the Spectres really want from me is the self-control necessary not to smack irreverent helmsmen upside the head," she said dryly.

Nihlus chuckled, a low sound awash in subharmonics. "While valuable, that would be more likely to see you promoted into politics, not the Spectres. You were brought aboard the Normandy because, while I evaluate your potential on behalf of the Council, we'll be executing joint missions on behalf of the Council. During that time Captain Anderson's _Normandy_ will be given some positive exposure that will make it clear that the joint project was a success, before being relegated to a role more suited to its stealth-tech. But a simple grab-and-go seemed to work best for our inaugural mission. Give us a chance to smooth over and differences, build trust, before we face live combat."

In a more perfect universe, that might have been how it worked. She served the Council well, opened the way for other human Spectres, and within two hundred years humanity would be granted a seat on the Council because it was too large, too dangerous to be allowed to consolidate its power in a splinter faction.

As it was, Joker's voice was the harbinger of worse things to come.


	2. Terminal Velocity (Part I)

A/N: Mass Effect 3 improved many things, graphically speaking. The female hairstyles were not one of them. My Shepard is not Akhenaten, so what is up with that strange, elongated skull look when you choose to sweep your hair up into a bun? Again, written in cooperation with Ghostdragon31. Some lines borrowed directly from the game, but everything belongs to Bioware anyway.

Mass Effect: Absolute Magnitude

Chapter One

-Terminal Velocity-

Part I

As Nihlus made to jog past her, Shepard's hand closed firmly over the armored rim of his carapace. Judging by the surprise on his face, either no one dared lay hands on Spectres or she'd violated some turian social norm. Which was entirely possible, as she was familiar with their politics, their tactics, and their anatomy, but their day-to-day living had seemed an irrelevant tangent.

One day she might correct that, but today she was addressing the gross stupidity that had just reared its head and declared it made better time on its own.

"What, exactly, do you think the political ramifications would be for humanity if you were to die here?" she asked him in a cutting, low voice. "I don't mean to insult your infiltration skills, but unless this beacon is something you can carry out on your own, it's not worth the risk of losing you behind enemy lines just so you can tell me it's the best-protected thing on this planet. Spectre or not, you saw the same footage I did. And unless you've secreted some weapon aboard that would make a ship of that size, with unknown armaments and payload, something that you can deal with on your own, I would appreciate it if you exercised appropriate caution."

Turian inscrutability had failed against this assault-she could clearly read surprise edged with insult on that alien face. His lateral mandibles flexed out in threat, then were pulled flush against his jaw.

"If I am worth taking into consideration for Spectre status, my judgment should also be worth taking into consideration," she pressed, grip tightening. "I realize time is of the essence, but the _Normandy_ isn't able to field a large enough ground team to afford losses." Shepard's smile was more a baring of teeth, full of the memory of Torfan and less storied missions. She'd lost the most men on Torfan, but it had been elsewhere she'd come closest to failing. It helped that she wasn't exaggerating. The Normandy had been crewed for stealth missions in space, meant to field only herself and Nihlus. The Corporal she'd be taking down was a comm specialist, the Lt. Commander had limited experience in hot zones. There wasn't going to be any room for heroics here.

"If you trust nothing else about my assessment, trust that."

Nihlus did not look pleased-and neither did Anderson in her peripheral vision-but she won a short nod of concession. "All right. But I'm taking point," he said, tone clipped and entirely unlike his usual self.

Shepard did not care that he was unhappy, only that he complied. She had no argument with his taking point, which meant something different in turian military culture than it did for someone accustomed to working with a full Special Ops team, four-man fire team, or a two-man sniper unit. To her, he'd designated himself as the scout, which would work out well so long as he respected the fact that he was tethered to the team.

Putting down went smoothly, their landing site well out of range of where the hostiles had been flagged on their radar.

"Alenko, Jenkins," she said curtly, signaling them to flank the turian. Corporal Jenkins, for all that he was green, at least was familiar territory. The Lt. Commander was a different story. She'd read his dossier, knew that he didn't like using his biotics on live targets and that he suffered from unpredictable, severe migraines as a result of his L2 amp. He was also Navy and a career officer, which made her a little leery, even though he'd given every indication of general battlefield competence.

It was not the fire team she would have chosen-not when something like this would have been best handled by a full squad with enough manpower to put down whatever was waiting for them, but she'd make do. And she'd make them do well enough that Nihlus wouldn't have reason to leave them behind.

She eyed the low, rocky ridges that compromised their line of vision, decided they looked scalable and despite earlier evidence to the contrary, she doubted Nihlus was stupid enough to skyline himself if she sent him up to assess their field. Still, his carapace meant that even belly-down he couldn't match her profile and she'd spent a chunk of her career of giving orders and support from an overlook position, though she'd done close work as well as an N7.

She'd done nigh everything as an N7 and she wished she had one of those elite and uniquely qualified teams working for her now.

"Hold," she ordered before they could round the rock formation, her eyes taking in a body that looked like it had spent a few weeks desiccating in the desert rather than being freshly killed.

The advanced decay, which had peculiarly turned the skin into a dark, almost leathery surface, made it harder to indentify cause of death even though it had been stripped, but it looked more like bullet wounds than anything she'd associate with an accident. Unless they had a tannin-rich watersource nearby that the body could have been dredged or dragged from-and there was no scavenger activity at all-she didn't have any good explanation for its condition or why it was here.

"What now?" Nihlus asked irritably, though he did stop and she'd seen him take notice of the body as well. Strange how much more strongly irritation traveled when driven by subharmonics.

"Give me time to get a seat with a view. I don't like blind turns. Or, rather, I do like blind turns, but in a purely professional sense," Shepard said as she scaled the rocks easily and in almost complete silence. She wouldn't have tried it on the local equivalent of shale, but it was such an easy climb she began to wonder if it was the result of clearing the fields rather than a natural feature of the landscape. She went to her belly as she crested the hill, careful not to dislodge loose stones as she crawled into a depression that was deep enough to offer some cover with compromising her view.

"Tucked in up there?" came Nihlus's voice, still grumpy but more for the sake of it than actual upset any longer. _Adaptable_ , she marked in her mental file.

"Snuggly," she reported, scanning the road for unfriendlies as her sniper rifle unfolded itself from its mag-holstered position Or, rather, the Alliance's sniper rifle. The rifle she'd used as an N7 was in storage, modded to the very edge of legality. She missed that rifle. At least she'd had the opportunity to mount a reflex sight atop her scope and make this rifle functional as something more than just long-range support. "Shuffle on."

Nihlus must have signaled for Jenkins and Kaidan to hold their position-he emerged smoothly onto the path in her peripheral vision, but her focus was on sweeping the rise of the path for any sign of movement.

Her brain registered the flicker of motion milliseconds before her body responded to it, head dropping to sight through her scope, breathing already calm, even and then _there-_ one drone down in fizzling sparks, another falling prey to Nihlus's more-than-impressive aim, and then the other down in the _one, two_ heartbeat she had to wait for the heatsink not to lock up the mechanism.

 _So that's a Spectre,_ she thought to herself as she raised her head but didn't otherwise shift her position, only slipping down to join the team when they came level with her.

The path funneled the up into a valley, where they met more of the drones. These apparently had less stealth-tech or their earlier encounter had stirred them out of dormancy-whichever it was, they didn't survive long enough for it to matter. Surprisingly enough, it was the Corporal who was the weak link. His training was solid enough, but his response time was sluggish.

They made quick time through a forest of huge, old-growth trees, somewhere between a mangrove and a redwood. They held up well to the high-speed, low power assaults laid on by the drones. With plenty of cover and enemies still showing up on their radar, she switched out weapons for her pistol-their movement was too quick and erratic for her to trust the slow reload of her rifle, even with the reflex sight and their shielding unimpressive-and paralleled Nihlus, enough space between encounters for her to get some sense of the turian's battle rhythm.

He would have made better time without them, but she still held that a dead Spectre was just as useless as a dead private, unless your object was a propaganda war.

The sound of gunfire not directed at them sped their advance, because though it had been made clear that their primary objective was the beacon, it would be valuable to have the testimony of something other than fuzzy vid to help shed some light on the ground conditions.

She'd never thought to see one of the geth-the 'quarian sin'-outside of an extranet site, but unless someone had gone through a great deal of trouble to model their troops on that distinctive profile, they were seeing the first major emergence from behind the Perseus Veil.

If she'd known that, she would have updated the photo-record function on her omnitool.

There was a survivor and the part of her that her parents would not be proud of was glad to see it was a Marine. Not so much because of a feeling of solidarity, but because most civilians in traumatic events were something worse than baggage and made terrible witnesses from a military point of view.

Not so a Marine, even if she was mentally passing judgment on armor with more pink than she thought ought to be allowed by regs. It was a measure of how little action this garrison expected to that she was even in personalized armor in the first place.

But her salute was crisp, her posture solid for having recently come from a slaughter. "Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams of the 212. You the one in charge here, ma'am?"

Shepard noted two things. Williams had assumed she was in charge, which meant that her own chain of command had fallen apart. And from the way her eyes had slid across the turian, despite the fact that he was leading the formation and fallen hopefully on Shepard's N7 insignia, she didn't like turians. That was _almost_ as standard-issue as her assault rifle, so Shepard ignored it when Nihlus didn't correct her.

"This is Spectre Kryik and I'm Commander Shepard. We're here to help," she said, modulating her voice to tread a fine line between concern and professionalism. "Can you tell us what happened, Williams?"

The question broke her composure, just a little, her body posture shifting to reflect how painful she found the memory. "Oh man," she breathed, "We were patrolling the perimeter when the attack hit. We tried to get off a distress call, but they cut off our communications. I've been fighting for my life ever since. My squad-," she made a strange, choked noise in her throat, "we tried to double back to the beacon, but we walked into an ambush. I don't think any of the others...I think I'm the only one left."

Shepard was not good at providing grief-counseling, even when the grief was fully justified, so she only said, "I'm sure you held as long as you could."

She was glad when Kaidan said, "The geth haven't been seen outside the Veil in nearly two hundred years. Why are they here now?"

It was Nihlus who answered. "The only thing of interest on Eden Prime is the beacon, though what the geth would want with it...," he flexed his mandibles dismissively. "Had they removed it from the dig site when your line broke?"

Williams shook her head. "No, sir. But there were a lot of them. It wouldn't have taken them long to remove it. The dig site's not far-I can take you."

"Let's go," Nihlus thrummed.

Shepard's attention was caught by a freshly impaled human as they moved toward the dig, her mind trying to work out why the geth would go to the trouble. A form of psychological warfare? There were more of them, their bodies approaching that desiccation she'd noted in the first corpse and she realized that those spiked did more than simple pierce. Again, motive escaped her.

"The beacon should be at the end of this trench," Ashley called.

Her eyes swept their surroundings, disliking this feeling of being funneled, caught on another rocky barrier that led up to a hill that would give her an excellent view of the area ahead.

"Breaking off," she reported to Nihlus, who gave her a short, thrumming answer that seemed affirmative.

Shepard moved her pace to something closer to a sprint so she could be in place before the team below arrived and though she kept scanning the area, found it completely absent of other snipers or the recon drones. She slowed as she drew closer, aiming for a ridge of rock that would give her cover, switching from her pistol to her sniper rifle.

As she'd expected, there were geth troopers clustered in the site, which was absent anything that looked like a beacon, though a low, circular depression at the center of the site gave her some idea where it might have once been.

She had worried that geth tech might be incompatible with her tech skills, but the nearest geth's shields stuttered and fell when she overloaded them and she was glad that they apparently hadn't thought to shift their main processing center out of their heads, toppling as her round pierced its metal skin.

If she'd been an AI race without organic limitations building an army, she might have randomized the location of the processor core and built-in secondary processors that would have allowed continued limited functionality even after they were partially destroyed. Sort of like inorganic krogan.

...it was a good thing she wasn't an AI species.

It was also a good thing that the geth didn't seem particularly clever, reacting more like pre-programmed drones than a sapient species. She ducked behind her ridge of rock as they turned their fire on her, giving the ground team below an unchallenged entrance. When she popped up again, overloading another trooper's shields, she found that they'd made neat work of several of the troopers. She downed another one and, counting on her shields to deal with a much-reduced enemy fire, used her rifle to bring down the shields of the other geth, each quickly finished by Nihlus.

Their pairwork was echoed by the other three humans, Jenkins overloading enemy shields, Kaidan reinforcing their own shields using his biotic abilities, and Williams ripping through enemies with all the furor of someone with comrades to avenge. It didn't take very long to clear the area and she saw Williams very deliberately kick one of the geth shells that lay in her path.

She wasn't privy to the short conversation that followed, but then Nihlus's voice came over the comm. "We're pressing ahead to the research camp," he said. "It's up the hill. We can rendezvous there."

So she hadn't been wrong-the scientists had opted to study the beacon in place before removing it, weren't offering it like an unopened present to the Council.

"Understood," she acknowledged, shifting from her cover and tacking up the hill. She paused as more of the spikes came into sight. Each of them had a body impaled on it, but these didn't just look desiccated. Their skin was darkened and shriveled, just as the others had been, but there was a distinctly inhuman grey tinge to the dermis and, last time she'd checked, humans weren't one of the species capable of bioluminescence. Unsettling blue light marched in inorganic patterns across their skin, like very poorly integrated cybernetics.

Rather than advance any further, she settled her rifle snuggly against her shoulder, getting a better look at the corpses through her scope. The view was no more pleasant for the greater magnification.

Her pause had given the ground team time to catch up, and she almost flinched as one of the bodies began to struggle on its spike, which responded by retracting and releasing the...thing.

It was an automatic reaction to pull the trigger and watch its head explode like an overripe melon, but the field of ambient electricity released by its death is unexpected. Her kill gives fair warning to the others, who took care to stay well outside of range. The other two bodies are soon enough just corpses again, all those strange lights winked out.

"Zombies," came Williams's voice as she rejoined them on the flat, " _Fucking_ zombies." There was a quiver to it, anger and fear all tangled up together. Shepard understood her disgust, but she knew it must have been worse for Williams, who might very well have known, worked with, lived with the people they'd been before they'd been reduced to those husks, drained of everything that had made them human.

But Williams kept it together as they split the squad to quickly sweep the camp, she, Kaidan, and Jenkins going to salvage what they could from the ruins. Shepard quickly overrode the security on the second trailer, which had been more designed to keep out thieves than stand against a siege. Luckily for the two scientists inside, the geth didn't seem to practice turian thoroughness.

"Humans! Thank the Maker!" The woman's breath caught when Nihlus-huge and hulking in the relatively confined space of the trailer-followed her inside, but beyond surprise she didn't seem overly upset.

The man hissed, "Hurry! Close the door! Before they come back!" His voice was strangely ragged, like he'd recently done a lot of shouting. Or screaming.

"No need to worry," Nihlus reassured them. "Everything outside is dead."

The woman's shoulders visible relaxed and her hands, which she'd been rubbing together nervously, fell to her sides. The man didn't look reassured, didn't straighten from that strange, hunched posture. But the woman ignored him. "That's such a relief," she said. "We heard when it went...quiet, but we were afraid to open the door, in case they were waiting for us. Manuel and I hid here during the attack. They must have come here for the beacon-there was a lot of shooting at first, but it didn't sound like they swept for survivors. No one tried the door until we heard you overriding the passcode. Of course, at first we thought that they'd made it over to the spaceport and retrieved the beacon and decided to..."

She trailed off, but she'd pricked Nihlus's interest. "The beacon was moved to the spaceport?"

"Yes, earlier this morning," the woman confirmed. "We didn't want to keep the pick-up team waiting. Actually, except for the Marines, Manuel and I were the only ones here when they struck. They," her breath caught on a half-sob, "they held them off long enough for us to get inside and seal the door. They gave their lives to save us."

"No one is saved," the man-Manuel?-interjected, his voice still strange in a way not all the screaming in the world could account for. "The age of humanity is ended. Soon, only ruin and corpses will remain. I saw him, you know. The prophet. Leader of the enemy. He was here, before the attack."

"A geth?" Shepard asked. All of the geth she'd seen so far had been identical to each other. Of course, she was also becoming quietly certain that the man had experienced a nervous breakdown.

"A turian," was the surprising answer.

"A turian?" Nihlus asked skeptically.

"Yes. He looks like us, but he belongs to _them_ ," Manuel said emphatically.

"What was this turian doing?" Nihlus pressed, though judging by the angle of his mandibles, he was just as skeptical about this testimony as she was.

"I'm sorry," the woman said, interrupting the man gently. "I didn't see a turian. Manuel's still a bit...unsettled."

"From the attack?" Shepard asked.

To her surprise, the woman shook her head. "Manuel has a brilliant mind, but he's always been a bit...unstable. Genius and madness are two sides of the same coin, but when we came here to research the beacon there was an incident. At first, we thought he'd had a stroke, but then this..."

"Is it madness to see the future? To see the destruction rushing toward us? To understand there is no escape? No hope? No, I am not mad. I'm the only sane one left!"

His words grew more insistent, more impassioned, with every sentence, but the woman was only shaking her head slowly. "I gave him an extra dose of his meds after the attack, but with the adrenaline..."

Shepard eyed the other scientist, but while he looked frustrated, there was nothing to indicate he'd turn to violence.

"The Alliance has already been alerted to the attack. I recommend you continue to shelter here until they arrive," Nihlus said, then glanced down at Shepard. "We've got to get to the spaceport before the geth decide to take the beacon off-planet."


	3. Terminal Velocity (Part II)

Absolute Magnitude

-Chapter Two-

Terminal Velocity

Part II

From all reports, the geth had launched a turian-style offensive, sending in a large enough force to crush any resistance with minimal loss on their part. And yet two things struck Shepard as the team tried not to lag behind Nihlus, their eyes on the enormous ship sweeping overhead.

There were no geth shells, except the ones they were leaving behind. And there were far fewer bodies in general than she'd expected.

The quarians had been reluctant to release any information on the exact level of emotional awareness possessed by the geth, though they clearly had some concept of 'death' if they'd perceived being shut down and reprogrammed as a threat. It could be sheer practicality at work, retrieving the deactivated shells and repairing them rather than manufacturing fresh platforms, but some part of her couldn't help but be curious about their thoroughness. Surely they weren't so desperate for scrap that they would collect even truly mangled platforms. Marines didn't leave men behind. Did the same hold true for geth?

(N7s didn't leave men behind, either, but for them it wasn't just camaraderie, it was a matter of leaving no evidence behind. It was only once she was running her own operations that she could be more certain of avoiding civilian involvement and, by extension, civilian casualties. If she hadn't thought she'd known her final destination from the moment she'd earned the right to be called a Marine after the crucible, from the moment when she'd been drowned, been baptized, and rose up as an N7, she'd have had a far worse time living with herself.)

The other was less a matter of curiosity and more a matter that warranted serious consideration. Eden Prime might not have had a large garrison, but with the discovery of the Prothean beacon, an asset that could earn prodigious credits on the black market, most of its force should have been concentrated on the protection of the relic.

That only a skeleton force had remained with the research team wasn't unusual, but three was less than she'd expected, especially as some of the equipment used in these kinds of digs was very heavy and very expensive. With relatively little threat elsewhere, she would have expected the garrison commander to lend some Marines to help shift supplies and close up the camp.

Maybe they had been here, she thought as she eyed an empty spike, still extended. And maybe the geth had some way of controlling their little zombie army and it wasn't only machines that they should expect to confront. Their original force was going to be enough to contend with without their ability to produce ready-made cannon fodder.

As they approached another installation, she shut down the extraneous thoughts. She had enough training to retain vigilance while working through theories, but abstract thought under the possibility of live fire was one of those things best done in moderation.

She hadn't seen the tell-tale movement of massed troops, so she signaled for the core team to check on another of the pre-fabs while she shadowed Nihlus down to the docks, prepared to offer support fire until the core team could rejoin them. Talking with the scientists seemed to have exhausted Nihlus's patience, but Shepard wasn't going to die because she was too impatient to sweep outbuildings.

But the firefight she was expected didn't materialize. Nihlus's voice carried bemusement when he identified the silver-plated turian pacing on the dock, but no hostility. "Saren," he said, lowering his weapon.

Shepard took in the familiarity in the greeting and realized she was looking at Saren Arterius, whose name was famous throughout the traverse. Or infamous, depending upon whether you agreed with his methods. As with all Spectres, information concerning him was classified, leaving him little more than a name and a legend.

She'd never seen a turian quite like Saren before, who resembled Nihlus about as much as pre-galactic migration Earth races resembled each other. They had enough characteristics in common to be part of the same species, but where Nihlus was smooth, sleek, and streamlined, Saren was all brutal power. There was none of the deceptive turian fragility at his waist, the angle of his cowl strangely flat, and the hard edges of his mandibles promised considerable crushing force rather than looking faintly vestigial. And he had a strange ancillary crest coming in along his cheekbones, which were left uncovered by his hood.

It was...unusual to see a barefaced turian serving in any acknowledged capacity-usually refusal to don colony markings was treated as something so unpatriotic, so unturian they were treated a like social lepers in the settled systems.

Somehow though, for being an aberration in almost every way, he came off as the essential turian, like he was the embodiment of a primeval ancestor come to rumble and sneer at too-civilized descendents. And he had a voice to made that image, low, powerful, faintly disdainful. "Nihlus."

"This isn't your mission, Saren. What are you doing here?" Faint irritation edged Nihlus's voice, something Shepard felt partially responsible for. Turians, even turian Spectres, liked it best when the chain of command was clear. His authority had been challenged enough today.

"The Council thought you could use some help on this one," Saren replied unperturbedly as he clapped Nihlus on the shoulder, glancing significantly over at Shepard.

She didn't respond to the taunt. The only thing about Saren as well-known as his tactics was his dislike of humanity.

"I wasn't expecting to find the geth here," Nihlus replied after the briefest pause. "The situation's bad."

"Don't worry," Saren said, shifting toward the stairs. "I've got it under control. They moved the beacon to the spaceport. I'd invite you to come along, but it looks like you brought a lot of baggage," he said as he drew level with Shepard.

For a human woman, Shepard was not short by any stretch of the imagination, but with Saren so close he was almost brushing against her shoulder, the angle required to meet his eyes was uncomfortable. But she did not step back and she did not look away.

And she was now certain she knew what a turian sneer looked like, fine hair prickling beneath her hardsuit as Saren walked on by. They said that a turian was not actually functionally stronger than a human, that a human with comparable conditioning would be their equal, but the fact was there just weren't very many humans with a turian's height. And no human came with their natural armor, though they had an edge on the reflexes side of the equation due to a more sensitive and efficient nervous system.

Somehow, she still preferred her odds with about two hundred meters between them.

"You didn't try to stop _him_ ," Nihlus murmured as he came level with her, his eyes focused on the senior Spectre.

Because she'd had enough time with Nihlus to know that at worst he would have said no; grabbing Saren's carapace seemed like a good way to lose an arm.

The senior Spectre moved at something they'd called the turian lope in training, a pace that looked gentler than a human sprint, but which their stride length made just as distance-eating. He was soon lost to sight, but the sound of gunfire made it relatively easy to track his progress.

She was a little surprised when Nihlus didn't immediately follow Saren, but she was distracted by a noise from behind one of the crates. Shepard vaulted over them before Nihlus reacted, one hands slammed up beneath the jaw- _human_ , her mind registered, which was the only fact that saw her holstering her pistol rather than putting a cluster of rounds somewhere effective.

"Wait!" he bleated, "Don't shoot! I'm one of you! I'm human!"

"What were you doing skulking around back there?" Nihlus asked, then shook his head sharply. "Never mind. It's safe enough now. Let him go. We need to follow Saren."

Shepard released her grip and the man stumbled back, clutching at his throat. Her eyes swept over the crates on the dock, which provided less than ideal cover, but she was beginning to have a sense that the geth weren't being careless. They were leaving witnesses.

This wasn't a covert operation. This-this was a declaration of geth military strength.

What exactly was so important about this beacon that it was worth ending their two hundred year isolation behind the Veil to retrieve it?

What did the geth stand to gain?

What did everyone else stand to lose?

Those were the thoughts battering themselves against the walls of her mind, but no matter what the answers were, they wouldn't matter if she didn't make it off this planet. The gunshots had stopped, so presumably Saren had cleared them a path, and the core team had returned. Alenko handed over a box of grenades, bounty from a home-grown smuggling operation, Williams had a few vitriolic words to say about ungrateful civilians, and then the whole team was moving toward the cargo rail.

At first she had to admire Saren's efficiency-there were enough geth littering the station that she caught Jenkins almost tripping over one in her peripheral vision-

No. He hadn't almost tripped. That was a geth hand, clutching at his leg, and it was a geth rifle that swept up and pressed into the soft hollow of his jaw, the contact muffling the shots that followed. His head snapped back, his barriers useless at point-blank range, the bullets piercing flesh, brain, skull, his helmet preventing a clean exit, leaving the bullets with just enough energy to pulp to his brain.

Shepard would know. She'd done it before.

"Barrier up!" she roared at Kaidan, already flinging a handful of grenades past him, the glowing wall of his biotics flickering to life milliseconds later. "Kryik, Williams-"

"Already on it, Shepard," Nihlus growled, pistol in hand, Williams at his shoulder, both of focused on putting down the nearest geth so that cover wasn't a synonym for grave marker. She and Kaiden slid in behind crates just as her grenades denoted, his barrier surviving long enough to protect them from shrapnel, the explosion killing enough geth to give them some breathing space.

She and Kaiden concentrated their fire ahead, while the other two mopped up behind. With their combined skills as well as a far reduced force facing them, she and Kaiden made an efficient team, stripping shields and slaughtering geth, him falling out of the rhythm occasionally to renew the barrier keeping the geth behind them from testing all those claims made by shield-tech manufacturers.

There was a pained grunt from Williams, but from the soft cursing, she would survive.

In the end, there weren't as many geth as the ambush conditions had made it seem, but it remained a fact that Jenkins was dead. Kaidan gently disengaged the shattered ruin of his helmet, flinching when he went to remove the whole thing and saw the mess underneath, but his hand was steady as he swept the Corporal's eyes-forever frozen in surprise-closed.

Williams had a hunted look in her eyes, the kind that came with seeing too many good men die too quickly. Some people never lost that haunted look, some people lost themselves to it. And not all the medication, psychiatrists, and alcohol ever seemed to help those men, though sometimes, in the thick of things, when there wasn't time to think, they seemed almost themselves again.

Shepard hoped that Williams didn't end up like one of those men, the ones with abridged expiration dates.

Her injury turned out to be nothing more than a bad graze, safely clotted by medi-gel, but Shepard was still worried by her mental state. Just like she'd hardly known what to say when she'd reported the slaughter of her garrison, Shepard didn't know what to say to her and to Kaidan, who'd seemed to have a rapport with Jenkins.

She hated the disingenuous platitudes that death brought, but Jenkins was almost a stranger to her, for all that he'd died under her command. Some part of her could hear Chakwas telling her about _soldiers like him_ , but Shepard had lost enough men to know that all of them had stories. "The Alliance probably has another ship en-route by now. I'll flag him on the map-they'll make sure he makes it home," she told the two of them as gently as she could manage. "But if we don't press on, he'll have died for nothing." And that she would regret more than his death itself.

Kaidan gave her a short, slightly jerky nod. "Understood, commander."

"Ma'am," Williams said tightly, hands clutching her rifle like a lifeline. "It was a trap. A big fucking trap."

"We know," Shepard told her, even softer, but all the warmth leached out of her voice. "We'll take care of it."

Nihlus made no comment as they pressed forward, their boots crunching on shattered fragments of geth and cargo. She wondered what he thought of this, if he was struggling to create some story in his head that might explain why the most infamous Spectre in the traverse was colluding with the geth. For her, there were too many unknowns to even begin sketching an explanation.

As luck would have it, it didn't take an explanation to pull a trigger, just pressure.

Though for the inquest that would doubtless follow, it would be useful to have a better reason for shooting a Spectre than "he set us up".

The rail still proved functional, which got them to the platform just in time for them to be assaulted by a fresh wave of geth, though this time Shepard had to be satisfied with their reduced team flanking her protectively as she had an opportunity to practice defusing timed explosives under heavy fire.

There was a reason some people found combat addictive, the brain reacting to death's proximity with a potent chemical cocktail that made every moment just that little bit _more._ The real trick was not to drown in it, to rush when her hands needed to be rock-steady.

She chose to be flattered that Saren had anticipated that they would survive the ambush and grateful that he'd used half-kiloton ordinances rather than something smaller and infinitely more surprising. Of course, an explosion that large would be enough to destroy the entire spaceport as well as the docks, which seemed excessive for just erasing evidence of his having been on-planet during the invasion.

Of course, she was also blindly attributing the placement of the explosives to the Spectre, when it might well have been whomever was directing the geth. There was no reason to blindly assume that was Saren, that was just her mind trying to give a face and a name to the attack, to attribute responsibility even at the expense of accuracy.

They swept the area with a grim efficiency, knowing that every second gave Saren more time to accomplish his agenda, but the four explosives she eventually disarmed gave ample evidence as to why they couldn't afford to charge blindly after him. But when Nihlus curtly judged the area clear and they pressed on to the shuttle docks, they found not Saren, but the beacon and what she assumed was the rest of the garrison.

Now shriveled, sexless husks of their former selves, they threw themselves mindlessly at the team. Dangerous only in proximity, as they still shed ambient arcs of electricity when they-was "died" even the right word for it, or would "shorted out" be more accurate?-went down, it was still tense work.

There was only one faint silver lining to being forced to shoot the ambulatory corpses of fellow servicemen-unlike the zombies that had staggered through human imagination since before holovision, these didn't require a perfect headshot to stop them. Enough damage to the center mass was enough to send power arcing through the air, leaving the faint scent of ozone.

Williams's breath was so ragged it almost sounded like she was crying, but her aim was absolutely steady.

Shepard could respect that.

Eventually, there were only the defiled dead and the beacon.

"Saren came this way," Nihlus growled almost too low to hear, "where is he?"

"And where are the geth?" Kaidan asked. "If the beacon was their target, you'd think they'd be here."

"And that ship came this way," Williams remarked. "Even if they hadn't had time to load the beacon yet, you can't exactly hide something that size."

Shepard's eyes swept the empty stretch of the port, coming to rest on the beacon. "It might not have been the physical beacon itself they were after. I didn't think to ask the scientists, but since we're handing it over to the Council, I assume they weren't able to 'open' it. If someone knew how, there might have been data dating from the Prothean period recorded on it. Though that really doesn't explain why they wouldn't retrieve it regardless. We're going to pray that the geth haven't developed effective visual stealth-tec for a ship that size and call in the _Normandy_ for a pick-up."

"It might be another trap," Nihlus pointed out.

Shepard inclined her head, acknowledging his point. "We'll sweep the area first, then make the call."

No further surprises were discovered, so they clustered near the beacon as Shepard made comm contact with the _Normandy._ She hadn't yet finished the pick-up request when she caught movement in her peripheral vision. Shepard automatically turned her body to look, not expecting anything more than someone shifting with impatience.

Kaidan breaking from the group and moving toward a now-glowing beacon was outside her expectations, but she shoved Williams aside and threw herself forward in a single movement. She'd meant to tackle Kaidan, thought that perhaps the glow had induced the reaction in a kind of hypnosis, but she felt the grav-shift as she came within range.

She managed to throw Kaidan clear of the grav-shifted field and she snarled, "Stay back!" when Nihlus stepped forward with a hand extended, but struggling only seemed to hasten the process. Like the needle on a compass orienting itself, no amount of will could stop her from turning to face the beacon.

Shepard felt her feet leave the ground, but her awareness was turning inward, her body something heavy, foreign, immobile. She was struck by the sensation that she wasn't alone, that she was one with an enormous network of consciousnesses.

And they were all screaming.


	4. Fever Dreams

Absolute Magnitude

-Chapter Three-

Fever Dreams

Shepard had an intimate history with nightmares, but nowadays it was only when she was very ill that they were as vivid as the vision that snatched her, dug its tendrils in deep, and spread through her with the force of a tsunami. Fragmented images coalesced and shattered with enough speed and violence to make her feel physically ill, a hypervelocity slideshow of devastation. Ruined landscapes, illuminated by the light of scorched ruddy skies, the sense of figures fleeing synthetics and...something, something terrible, and cast behind each image of destruction was that some _thing._

What was left of herself said _insect_ , but those innumerable voices screaming at her in an indistinct cacophony drowned that thought.

Her sense of direction, her sense of her own body-all of it was shorted out as surely as she'd overloaded the geth shields. The outside world intruded on her little microcosm of misery with needle-like sharpness, brief as pinpricks. Voices she recognized, suddenly as alien as the ones in her head. Strange arms, her forehead impacting against an armored carapace.

Even that tenuous grasp on reality slipped away, the images flickering faster and faster, the screaming building to a crescendo. And then her world went dark and silent.

[ _Mass Effect_ ]

It wasn't a seizure, exactly-those manifested with similar symptoms across most species, but what it was Nihlus couldn't say. All he knew was that his Spectre candidate was unresponsive and the beacon they'd been sent to retrieve was a smoking ruin.

As a Spectre, Nihlus was used to being the last resort, the one who stepped in when conventional methods failed. This, however, was enough to shock even him. He'd known Saren for a long time and though Spectres didn't usually work together, Saren had been the agent who'd mentored him at the start of his career. Though he'd known the older turian hated humans, he'd never imagined it would come to something like this.

And to think, only days ago his most pressing mystery had been the human Spectre candidate now breathing shallowly in his arms.

Service records and psych evals hadn't really prepared him for Commander Shepard, which he'd expected. Raw data wasn't the same as in-person observation, even had his reports been more thorough. He'd known she was highly intelligent, but he hadn't predicted it would manifest in being very well-read. In any military, there was that old 'hurry up and wait' adage, but Shepard filled both her off-duty hours and those inescapable wait periods with datapads.

So much of her time was spent on them he'd requested a record of her searches and downloads. They'd leaned heavily on biology, anthropology, history. Somehow, that had surprised him. The Butcher of Torfan had the intellectual curiosity of an asari undergrad.

She even worked with some measure of the calculated social grace that he expected when dealing with any asari over five hundred. Human hearing might be able to pick up sounds at greater distances, but they had nothing on turians for tonal differentiation. He could hear politeness and calculation when they heard only sincerity. And Commander Shepard was very polite.

She was also slightly unnerving. Her eyes-gunmetal grey-never seemed to flinch, which was impressive, or warm, which made him worry about sociopathic tendencies. They already had enough salarians to meet that particular quota.

His evaluation had been favorable. Even now, with the beacon destroyed, that hadn't changed. But now they had much larger problems than whether or not a human should be inducted into the Spectres. Now they were looking at an invasion, led by one of their own, one of their best.

And he couldn't help but think that Saren knew them all well enough he'd make sure there wasn't a damn thing they could do until it was too late to stop him. For all that C-Sec complained that the Spectres weren't much better than criminals themselves, every Spectre knew who held their leash.

It was a long leash, sure, but sometimes that collar was tight enough to choke.

[ _Mass Effect_ ]

There was a noise.

It was the first thing she noted, because her head felt like someone had shoved a quarter-pound of gravel inside her skull and given it a good shake. The noise made it feel like someone was still shaking it.

She was halfway off the table, intending to make it _stop right now_ , when she realized what she was hearing was a turian vocalization. Her head hurt too much to try to interpret it, but Shepard slumped back to the table in recognition that it wasn't a threat.

It took a few seconds longer to recall that it was Nihlus, still more to remember why she was in the medbay.

By that time, Dr. Chakwas had rounded the table. "You had us worried there, Shepard," she said lightly. "How are you feeling?"

Shepard considered the question. "Like I've discovered what it's like to be a biotic with a badly synced amp," she decided aloud. "Some muscle stiffness, but primarily a migraine. Light and sound sensitivity, but only limited nausea."

She looked up to find Chakwas smiling at her. "I see someone has trained you well," she remarked. "Usually I find resistance to even the idea that soldiers aren't invincible. Or at least don't regenerate like krogan."

Shepard made the mistake of chuckling, then had to clutch at her head. "Ah-hah," she said when she caught her breath again. "Way, way back, had a doctor that said we could pull the, ah, "macho bullshit" routine with everything except possible internal bleeding of any kind. Then you really might feel fine and slump over dead an hour later."

"Very true," Chakwas replied. "However, despite being in a coma for fifteen hours, my state-of-the-art medbay says there's nothing wrong with you."

"Nothing?" Nihlus rumbled.

Chakwas stepped back and shifted so that her back wasn't to the turian. "Nothing. No swelling or bleeding to explain the loss of consciousness, but the scans did pick of heightened neural activity."

"Dreaming?" Shepard asked.

Chakwas shook her head. "Not quite. It was more similar to scans taken during asari neural entanglement. Something happened down there, with the beacon."

"I think we-or rather Kaiden-must have activated it. And it tried to broadcast its message, which may or may not have worked out better with a biotic."

Nihlus regarded her curiously, head titled to one side. "You think it activated because he was a biotic?"

"It remained dormant while the researchers were studying it and when it was removed from the site, so it obviously wasn't a proximity trigger," Shepard pointed out. "And while human biotics aren't telepathic, their brain read-outs are similar to asari, who can share memories." And then it was her turn to tilt her head thoughtfully.

"What is it?" Nihlus asked, mandibles flaring slightly.

"That scientist, the one who was talking about the end of the age of humanity. Dr. Manuel. The woman said they'd thought he had a stroke, that he'd always been unstable. What if he wasn't? What if he was the first to interact with the beacon? He could have been a biotic. It's possible that the beacon's message might have been clearer for him."

"It's possible," Nihlus conceded, leaning back against the wall. "But we won't have an opportunity to replicate the experiment. After you collapsed, the beacon exploded. I can have someone locate him and question him, if you think it would help."

Shepard was still caught on 'the beacon exploded.' "The retrieval mission was a failure, then," she said tonelessly.

"We brought the fragments aboard, but it's unlikely that they'll be able to restore functionality," Nihlus said, but he sounded more frustrated than upset.

Which was fine. She'd felt her expression shut down as anger boiled beneath the seamless facade. All those lives destroyed and for what? An objective they hadn't even obtained. It was one thing to spend and gain, because that was what war was, another to _waste_.

"So, what was the message?" Nihlus asked her and she met his eyes, green very vivid against the black of his sclera.

"It's a warning. Or at least it seems to be. Think of it as uploading to an incompatible device. I think the data was corrupted during the transfer. Either that, or the Protheans could comprehend at speeds a human mind can't. So all I come away with are images of destruction, caused by an unidentifiable synthetic race, and an impression of an enemy terrible enough to put the fear of God into a race that built the Citadel and the mass relays. But I can't imagine why that would be important enough to draw the geth from behind the Veil. Or why it would inspire a Spectre to cooperate with them. What do you know about the end of the Prothean empire?"

Nihlus shook his head. "Not enough to give you a good answer. To me, Protheans were always more of a curiosity than anything else. There are more pressing problems for a Spectre than the mysteries of a race that lived 50,000 years ago. Usually illegal trade in their artifacts," he said with a touch of his usual humor. But that quickly turned black. "As for Saren...," his subharmonics rumbled ominously. "I haven't tried to raise him. We'll save that for the Council."

Shepard heard the doors hiss open and she turned to see Anderson come in the door.

"Sir," she said, coming to attention and not covering her wince very well.

"Sit down, Shepard. I'm glad to see you're up, but no need to press our luck."

Shepard sunk obediently back down to the table.

"Dr. Chakwas, I hate to kick you out of your own medbay, but I need to speak to these two in private."

"No need to apologize, Captain. It will give me a good opportunity to go assure Kaidan and our new Gunnery Chief that the Commander has come to no lasting harm."

When the doors had slid shut behind the doctor, Anderson turned back to them. "Well, I'm not going to lie. It could have been much worse. But the fact that I'm expecting the geth invasion to overshadow the destruction of the beacon isn't a good thing. And the Council will want answers for all of it. Including Saren."

Shepard had an opportunity to hear what an incredulous snort sounded like coming from a turian. It involved a good deal more vibration than its human counterpart, but it was recognizable. "All we know now is that Saren was on-planet and, unless he has gotten very careless, he staged an ambush for us using geth forces. There's nothing like turian honesty, but I doubt Saren will confess simply because the Council asks."

"What about his motive?" Anderson asked. "Anything about the beacon indicate why Saren might want it?"

"It might have been the geth who wanted it," Shepard pointed out. "Just because Saren was there isn't enough reason to assume that he was leading the geth. He could just be cooperating with their goals to achieve his own. What I don't understand is why they left the beacon behind at all. Saren obviously reached it first and unless turians have suddenly developed an unprecedented ability to manipulate gravity, he left that port by more conventional means. Even if he managed to activate the beacon, why leave it behind?"

"He might have assumed that it would kill any human that tried to use it," Nihlus said thoughtfully. "Or maybe when he tried retrieving the message all he got was garbled data, just like you did."

"What's this about data?" Anderson asked, looking thoroughly unconvinced by her argument that there was no reason to assume the Saren was in a position to command the geth.

"The reason I collapsed. The Prothean beacon transferred a message. Unfortunately, I don't think it was designed for human brains. Red skies, destruction, fleeing that destruction. A lot of screaming, synthetics slaughtering an organic race." Shepard shook her head, "It's not very useful. Nothing I would stage an invasion for."

Anderson made a thoughtful sound. "No. But we have no guarantee that was the only information stored on the beacon. Lost Prothean technology? Blueprints for some ancient weapon of mass destruction? It's possible that Saren took whatever it was and left only the warning, because he thought he didn't need it."

Shepard and Nihlus exchanged a glance. "Possible," the turian conceded.

"Probable," Captain Anderson countered. "I know Saren. I know his reputation, his politics. He believes humans are a blight on the galaxy. This attack was an act of war! He has the secrets from the beacon. He has an army of geth at his command. And he won't stop until he's wiped humanity from the face of the galaxy."

"I don't know if I'd go that far, but I do agree that Saren needs to be stopped. Which will be difficult. We'll need Council support to do it," Nihlus said.

"Which will be difficult," Shepard echoed. "Our evidence is mostly circumstantial."

"Still, we have to try," Captain Anderson said firmly. "I'll contact the ambassador and see if he can get us an audience with the Council. He'll want to see us as soon as we reach the Citadel. We should be getting close, report to the bridge as soon as you can."

When Anderson had left, Shepard glanced over at Nihlus, who had his mandibles flared aggressively. "I don't think your Alliance really understands what Spectre status means to the rest of the galaxy," he said when he caught her looking. "Spectres are invested with enough autonomy that even holding one requires a unanimous decision from the Council. The vetting process that your ambassador has been complaining about is as long as it is because of how difficult it is to get all three Counselors to agree to declare someone rogue. Saren's been a Spectre a long time. Not only is his service record against us, but he's also got resources: ships, money, and connections. Hunting him will be very difficult."

"I don't disagree. But those are Captain Anderson's orders. And we have limited options."

"Every Spectre has a C-Sec liaison. I'll contact mine, see if they can't unearth something incriminating. Unfortunately, there's a lot of legal leeway for a Spectre and Saren isn't careless enough to leave behind flashing neon signs that say, 'Planning geth invasion of human colony, galactic domination to follow.'"

"We're alive, aren't we?" Shepard asked, sliding from the table. "That's careless enough for me."

[ _Mass Effect_ ]

She spent the brief period before docking touching base with what was left of the ground team. Kaidan had gotten a confirmation that the Alliance follow-up had retrieved Jenkin's body and Williams had gotten the news that there had been survivors from her garrison further from the geth drop-site. It was better than a complete slaughter, but not by much. So the Marine was grateful to have been brought aboard by Anderson, to have an enemy to that, however difficult, could be beaten. Not like those left planetside, who would have to confront the reality of their comrade's deaths in the empty racks, the silent rooms, and the smoldering ruins.

"Just in time," Joker said as she drew abreast of his station. "I was just about to bring us in to the Citadel. See that taxpayer money at work."

For some of the crew, it was their first sight of the Citadel and Shepard heard them behind her, clustering at the viewports. It was a compelling sight, like a flower unfolding out of the light of the Serpent Nebula, but it was one she'd seen. And even if she hadn't, it was below her dignity as an officer to gawk. Even at the _Destiny Ascension,_ which was massive but wholly lacking in the sleek, raptorial lines of turian or human ships. Some things were flattered by the gracious, gentle curves of asari architecture. Starships were not one of them.

When they'd docked, Nihlus had been summoned to give a report to the Council in person, leaving Shepard, Anderson, and the rest of the ground team from Eden Prime to Udina.

Shepard understood intellectually why Udina had been chosen as humanity's ambassador. Aside from his willingness to live and work among aliens, he was a gifted linguist-universal translators were the product of the asari and therefore not considered wholly trustworthy in high-stakes politics-and had a sound grasp of macroeconomics. It had also been felt that his tenacity and aggression would present a very clear picture of humanity's strength and make it clear to other species that humanity was not a race to be trifled with.

Which was sound enough in theory, but in practice Udina was grating and did not help the impression that humanity was a bit of a bully.

Her expression betrayed none of this as she watched the ambassador's interview with the Council, because whatever her personal feelings about him, he'd forced the Council to hold a hearing concerning their top agent in the brief period between Captain Anderson's contact and their arrival at the Presidium. Gracious he was not, but his effectiveness was why he remained ambassador.

She held on tight to that thought as Udina turned his frustration from the unproductive meeting on them.

"The mission on Eden Prime was a chance to prove you could get the job done, Commander. Don't make the mistake of thinking that other candidates weren't considered for the opportunity to become humanity's first Spectre, many of whom active Spectres agreed to sponsor if we decided on them. Almost all of them had less controversy surrounding their career. _All_ of them presented less of a political risk. But we settled on you because you possessed what intel judged to be the most important commonality between the Council agents we are aware of-the ability to get things done. And the one time the whole galaxy has its eyes fixed on you, you fail."

Shepard didn't think even she could apologize for not anticipating a geth invasion without sounding sarcastic, so she kept a diplomatic silence.

Nihlus had been right to say that the Systems Alliance didn't understand what being a Spectre meant to the rest of the galaxy. There were more rumors about the agents of the Council than verifiable fact and no one had seen fit to issue humanity a statement detailing how they were selected, how their missions were assigned, or even how many of them were active in Council space. Most of what they knew about them came from diligent efforts to separate fact from fable on the part of Alliance intel and the clauses that dealt with them in the treaty that had made humanity a Council race.

Their final analysis had landed somewhere in the midst of peacekeeper, spec-ops operative, and spook, so Shepard didn't doubt they'd had trouble finding someone to fill the role.

"That was Saren's fault, not hers," Captain Anderson said, coming to her defense when it was clear she wasn't going to do it herself.

"Then we better hope, " Udina replied sharply, "that the C-Sec investigation turns up evidence to support our accusations. Otherwise the Council might use this excuse to not only deny you entrance into the Spectres, but also to delay having anyhuman Spectres." His eyes lingered strangely on Anderson as he said it. "Come with me, Captain. I want to go over a few things before the hearing. Shepard-you and the others can meet us at the Citadel Tower. Top level. I'll make sure you have clearance to get in."

Shepard nodded sharply, then checked the time. Several hours before the hearing began. "Williams, Kaidan, we have some time. If you'd like to do the tourist thing, we'll rendezvous at the base of the Tower a half hour before the hearing is scheduled to open. I'd advise you to take the chance-casual tourists aren't allowed on the Presidium and the Commons are stunning."

"What about you, Commander?" Williams asked.

"Something similar. Dismissed."

Not that she didn't appreciate the view from the Presidium's balconies-there was something breathtaking about the sharp contrast between the sleek white curves, all modern efficiency, against the tranquil lakes and softly rustling foliage of trees carefully chosen from the far reaches of the inhabited galaxy. But admiring the landscape fell below assessing her battlefield on her list of priorities. And, happily enough, it was only a short walk to the Executor's office.

She didn't expect to be able to secure an audience with the Executor easily, as he was a being in charge of a force of two hundred thousand officers, not what passed for law enforcement on a rim world, but such offices were generally staffed with underlings who could at least point her in the right direction for an update on the investigation into Saren.

She was therefore very surprised to discover only one turian in the expansive office, the other workstations empty, their holographic interfaces dormant.

Judging social hierarchy by the layout of a room was sometimes tricky once out of human-dominated space, but a necessary skill when bursting into rooms and prioritizing targets. In an Alliance office, the large desk that greeted the door would have housed the equivalent of the asari receptionist stationed outside the embassies. Someone to restrict access to the person in charge. But C-Sec was turian-dominated and turians were a high power distance culture in some ways, with every citizen acutely aware of their place in the social hierarchy; a turian who had no business seeing the Executor simply wouldn't and those that did would be sharply aware that they were imposing on his time.

Still, with the asari, volus, elcor, and humans on the Citadel, she would be surprised if they hadn't taken some measures. Unless doing so would be construed as a deliberate insult.

As interesting as she found these sorts of considerations, she was glad to stand far enough outside the realm of interplanetary politics to make observations and rest safe in the knowledge that in a few days she would return to the much simpler politics of shooting things.

He glanced up as the door hissed shut behind her. "Commander Shepard. I didn't expect to see you here. Did Ambassador Udina send you?"

"No, sir," she ventured. "I'm afraid you have the advantage."

"Venari Pallin, Executor for Citadel Security. If you're not here for Udina, what brings you to C-Sec?"

"To see if any progress had been made on the Saren investigation."

"Commander, I am not in the habit of releasing information about ongoing investigations," Pallin replied. His deep, growling voice and underlying subharmonics made it difficult to isolate tone, but she thought he sounded irritated. "If you make Spectre, I'll be obliged to answer your questions. Until then, you're not above the rules."

It actually hadn't occurred to Shepard that the information wouldn't be released to her. She'd been an N7 for a long time, which meant that provided she had a substantive reason, most files in Alliance Space opened for her. It was habit to expect answers from official sources, but this was actually a little mortifying. She hadn't meant to presume, but here she had. "I apologize, sir," she said stiffly. "I had no intentions of questioning your integrity."

Pallin regarded her levelly for a long, silent moment. He was a striking turian, his colony markings a powdery blue that spread across his face and crest like the markings on a moth's wings. Shepard reminded herself sternly that even thinking of her habit as 'birdwatching' was enough to start a fight-or a lawsuit-if she said it aloud. People-watching was stressful, but from the moment she'd stepped onto her first hub world, she'd found that watching turians, salarians, krogans-asari had too much in common with humans and hanar, elcor too little-was relaxing.

It was also shameless and self-indulgent, and if she was going to be spending more time working alongside them rather than shooting them, it needed to stop.

"I'm very sorry to have wasted your time, Executor," she said and turned to leave.

"The detective we have on it is very good," Pallin said. "Also a little unorthodox, which is probably for the best when it comes to dealing with a Spectre. Especially a Spectre like Saren, who doesn't even give his liaison a courtesy heads-up before he does things we have to clean up after. Or who drops in and takes one of our suspects into his own custody whenever he feels like it, without so much as an explanation. I've worked in C-Sec for thirty years and never had to break the law to do my job. Not once. Which is why I don't like the idea that there are people exempt from them. Accountability should exist on all levels, not just where it's convenient."

Shepard turned back to face Pallin, who was watching her carefully. Testing the waters, she thought, measuring her reply. "I don't think you're wrong," she said softly.

"Oh?"

"In a perfect galaxy, there would exist a law system that was capable of addressing any and every situation. One that was swift, efficient, and never incorrect in its judgment. But because we live in a galaxy that evolves more swiftly than the laws, because we have criminals who are capable of manipulating the system for their own ends, and because justice must be slow and meticulous for fear of being wrong, there will always be exceptional circumstances. And the Council must be capable of addressing those circumstances."

"Hence the Spectres?"

"Hence the Spectres as I understand them," Shepard replied. "Though 'necessary,' which I think they are, isn't the same as 'immune to corruption,' which I think they aren't."

"Even when we suspect corruption, it's very rare that we're allowed to investigate," Pallin remarked, locking his fingers beneath his jaw, spreading his elbows wider on his desk to make the position more comfortable.

"Do you _really_ want to know exactly what your government condones while you aren't looking?" Shepard asking with a tight, slightly bitter smile. "People-turians, humans, asari-need their illusions. They need to believe in their government."

"You might have a point," Pallin conceded. "But I don't have to like it. It was...interesting, Commander," he said, straightening. "I hope you have a pleasant day."


	5. For the Consideration of the Counsel

A/N: On turian clothing-when you're imagining it, we're going for something a little closer to some of the concept art and little further from what actually appeared in the game. For reference, Google these two artworks, which will explain more than full paragraphs (both are located on Deviantart, but this site eats the full address):

Fancied-Up-356921678

Garrus-01-clothes-1-159093573

Absolute Magnitude

-Chapter Four-

For the Consideration of the Counsel

For every official source of information there were no less than three unethical sources, someone had once told her.

As that someone had gone off the grid the instant her contract expired, taking two of their best civilian contractors with her and was still alive after almost a decade of being an independent contractor in the Terminus Systems, Shepard was inclined to believe her.

The Citadel, however, was not just unfamiliar territory. It wouldn't be the first time she'd operated without contacts or favors owed, though it had been a long time. It was more that she suspected that information traded on the Presidium involved galactic stakes and therefore incurred galactic rates.

She wasn't willing to pay quite that much to have it confirmed that without months of investigation by someone who had something well above C-Sec clearance, Saren was untouchable.

Also, she'd liked the Executor. It would feel like a small betrayal if she made use of the other sources, even if he never discovered it.

Which left her with-she checked her omnitool display out of habit-entirely too much time on her hands. Shepard spent it drifting around the Presidium, investigating, listening, and watching, though it would normally be impossible to be inconspicuous in full dress. Comfort, however, was out of the question.

She was the first one back to the rendezvous point, but she didn't have to wait long for Kaidan and Williams to rejoin her. Both looked more at ease than they'd been, though some of the stress lines reappeared as the two soldiers glanced up at the Tower, reminded anew of their purpose.

The long elevator ride was made in a silence broken only by the sound of cloth rubbing against cloth as someone shifted impatiently.

When they stepped from the elevator, it was into a kind of purpled twilight, all ribbed, soaring ceilings and illuminated trees. Shepard was instantly at ease, some miracle of acoustics dampening the sound of other conversations to leave her feeling almost as if she walked alone beneath the trees.

It was a scene completely at odds with every human government building that she'd ever been in, which were all designed to make visitors feel small, insignificant, and ill at ease. The days of aesthetics being prioritized over utility had gone the way of kings, but this park...

Whatever poor news the Council had for them, it would be easier to bear with composure now. That this was a calculated effect didn't matter to Shepard; she could only be pleased that they'd bothered.

She was so distracted by the trees she almost bypassed a pair of turians despite recognizing the Executor, but Saren's name brought her up short.

"Saren's hiding something! Give me more time. Stall them," a turian in C-Sec standard issue pleaded with Pallin, subharmonics aggressive. She could immediately see why the Executor had called him "unconventional." Holding public arguments with his superior wasn't something she expected from a turian, though she thought that kind of grit was exactly the reason the Executor would have chosen to send him after a Spectre.

"Stall the Council? Don't be ridiculous. Your investigation is over, Garrus," Pallin replied, none of his earlier antipathy toward the Spectre obvious in his voice. His eyes fell on Shepard as he turned aside and he inclined his head slightly in recognition, but said nothing as he strode away.

Still radiating tension, the strange turian turned toward her. "Commander Shepard? Garrus Vakarian. I was the officer in charge of the C-Sec investigation into Saren."

"You sound unhappy with your results."

"I don't trust him," Garrus said, crossing his arms tight across his carapace. "Something about him is grit in my plates. But he's a Spectre, everything he touches is classified. I can't find any hard evidence." His head tilted slightly to one side. "And you don't seem surprised by that."

"I'm not doubting C-Sec's competence or yours, but this was the kind of thing that needed a full task force, top level clearance, and a lot more time than we gave you," Shepard said frankly. "That you came away with anything but frustration for an investigation going nowhere is impressive enough. You're probably more aware than I am that it was a token investigation, meant to appease Ambassador Udina, but I appreciate the effort."

Garrus just shook his head, a wordless sound of frustration escaping him.

"Commander," Kaidan said, a low-voiced reminder of the time.

"It was a pleasure meeting you, Officer Vakarian."

"Good luck, Commander," the turian called after her. Lower, so she almost missed it, he said, "Maybe they'll listen to you."

Anderson was waiting for them on the steps leading up into Council chambers and Shepard followed him inside without either of them saying a word. Torfan had never went to a formal trial, but it wasn't her first hearing. It wasn't even her first antagonistic jury, but it might well have involved the highest stakes.

Nihlus stood silently glowering to one side, his interview apparently over. She'd hoped that his word would lend a lot of weight to their sparse evidence. Turian honesty was one of those pleasant stereotypes that had solidified into a universally accepted truth, like turian loyalty.

Human honesty, on the other hand, ranked lower on the scale. They might have demanded examination by a truthseeker, which was the living, breathing asari equivalent to a polygraph test, but human memory had proved to be too malleable in the past for that to stand unquestioned.

Which was just as well. Shepard had several thoughts on aliens in her mind, all of which had grown far less flattering after her tête-à-tête with the beacon.

As Kaidan and Williams answered questions posed to them about the reports that had been submitted, Shepard fixed her eyes on Tevos, pondering what asari might actually look like without the pheromones and whatever else it was that made them attractive even to salarians. She'd known from the moment they'd entered the room what the verdict would be. It was only a matter of waiting it out, now.

When it was her turn to be cross-examined, she kept her answers brief.

"The geth attack is a matter for some concern," Tevos offered, her tone conciliating. "But there is no evidence to support your charge of treason. Saren admits to being on Eden Prime, investigating several suspicious readings from that sector. Which turned out to be the geth dropship you spoke of. But he was there to investigate what turned out to be a geth invasion, not to lead it."

"He set us up for an ambush!" Williams protested, forgetting herself for a moment.

"The geth were all down when I left," Saren's hologram said unperturbedly. "After confirming the presence of the beacon, I decided that my priority was to determine whether the ship was only the vanguard of a larger force. Nihlus was on the ground with a Spectre-candidate. I didn't think they'd require my supervision to complete their mission. It seems I was wrong."

"You told me that the Council had sent you," Nihlus retorted in a tightly controlled voice.

"Yes. However, baiting you about your choice of Spectre-candidates isn't treason. And, after she managed to destroy the beacon, it looks like my reservations were well-founded. I see you even brought Captain Anderson with you. Strange, how often he seems to be involved in making false charges against me. Humanity needs to learn its place. You aren't ready to join the Council. You're not even ready to join the Spectres," he sneered.

"You have no authority to make that decision," Udina protested vehemently.

"Shepard's admission into the Spectres is not the purpose of this hearing," Tevos agreed, her voice gently chiding as she glanced over at the hologram of Saren.

"This hearing is a waste of your time, Councilors. And mine," was Saren's retort.

"There is still the outstanding issue of Commander Shepard's vision," Anderson pressed. "It may have been triggered by the beacon."

"Are we allowing dreams into evidence now? How can I defend my innocence against this kind of testimony?"

"I agree," Sparatus said, clearly impatient to bring the matter to an end. "Our judgment must be based on facts and evidence, not wild imaginings and reckless speculation."

That earned a nod from Valern. "Do you have anything else to add, Commander Shepard?"

Shepard was silent for a long moment, head tilted slightly in consideration. "Would you have said that if I was asari?"

That took the Counselors aback. "Would you mind clarifying that statement, Commander Shepard?" Valern asked.

"Dreams, visions, wild imaginings. If it had been an asari who interacted with the beacon, would you have made that same accusation, or would you have assumed that it communicated something to her via a method similar to their neural entanglement? The beacon was destroyed. That is a fact. But you seem to be overlooking the issue of _how_. It's not as if it was a glass paperweight I dropped. Your teams will find no evidence of explosives. What they will find is some sort of internal meltdown, caused by the activation of the beacon."

"Yes," Sparatus drawled. "You did include that hypothesis in your reports, that Protheans were capable of transmitting and imprinting messages directly in the mind. A very garbled message, which proves nothing and cannot be proven as anything more than an especially vivid dream after a tiring day."

"Perhaps not, Councilor," Shepard conceded. "What the beacon showed me was likely unrelated to Saren and the primary cause of this hearing, regardless. I simply dislike being held accountable for breaking a fifty thousand year old artifact by standing next to it. To have the very uncomfortable product of that interaction dismissed as a hallucination, to be held against me on my next mandatory psych eval and used as a reason to keep me from the Spectres-I can and will accept the responsibility of a failed mission, but I want it to be very clear in the record that I am not unstable or prone to wild imaginings." She might have over-emphasized those last two words, judging by Sparatus's response. "That is all."

There was some exchanging of speaking glances on the Council's part and Tevos's next announcement came as no surprise. "The Council has found no evidence of any connection between Sovereign and the geth. Ambassador, your petition to have him disbarred from the Spectres is denied."

Udina's expression barely masked tightly controlled anger that became less controlled as Saren's hologram said, "I am glad to see justice was served," before flickering out.

This time, it was Anderson who caught the lash of Udina's frustration, but while she was curious about the open antagonism between the Spectre and the Captain, she agreed that being openly aggressive without rock-solid evidence wouldn't get them anywhere. In order for that to happen, they needed not only what information the first investigation had produced and a breakthrough beyond that, but also an uncompromised chain of custody. No other species was as legally pernicious as humans, but there was no point in taking chances.

Another Council-sanctioned C-Sec investigation wasn't in the forecast, but with Nihlus, his Spectre authority, and the frustrated C-Sec officer who'd asked for more time, this could be salvaged.

"I need to contact a C-Sec officer named Garrus Vakarian," she told Udina.

"That's right," Kaidan said. "He was arguing with the executor when we came in."

"Asking for more time to finish his report," Williams's voice held distinct excitement. "He must have thought he was close to finding something."

"Best not to go through the official channels," Udina replied thoughtfully. "I have a contact at C-Sec named Harkin who can help you track Garrus down without drawing attention to yourselves."

"Forget it," Anderson said sharply. "They suspended Harkin last month. Drinking on the job. I wouldn't waste my time with that loser."

Shepard's brows rose and she glanced over at Udina. It seemed strange that a man as politically realpolitik as Udina would keep a contact who was a liability. The thought must have been clear on her face, because Udina grimaced. "There are very few humans in C-Sec. My choices were very limited and, at the time, Harkin seemed an acceptable choice. He is still your best chance at contacting this Vakarian without drawing the attention of the Council. Or anyone else." His eyes flicked over to Anderson. "Captain, your past with Saren makes you a liability. Shepard will handle this investigation."

Anderson nodded sharply. "Understood."

"Good. I have some things to take care of, but we'll meet in my office later. There are other things we need to discuss." Without waiting for a reply, Udina walked away.

Anderson watched him go, then turned back to Shepard. "I doubt he'll be useful, but Harkin will probably be getting drunk at Chora's Den. It's a dingy little club in the lower section of the wards."

"For a man who's a drunken loser, that's an awfully specific location," Kaidan observed.

A brief flash of humor broke through Anderson's expression. "Let's just say that it's a little difficult to get a drink on the Citadel somewhere where the press can't find you and where you also aren't likely to catch something. I've seen him there once or twice and if he's suspended without pay, he's going to be more concerned with how cheap the drinks are than the atmosphere. Though he seemed to like the atmosphere just fine."

Shepard nodded. "If I can ask, sir, what's your history with Saren?"

Anderson's eyes trailed over Williams and Kaidan. "Ask me later, Shepard. That's just history-we have to be concerned with right now." Shepard understood his unspoken message, though she should have guessed. Anderson was something of a legend; if he'd done work with someone as infamous as Saren, it would have been common knowledge unless it was a mission that the higher-ups had decided was best marked confidential and tucked away.

"If Harkin doesn't pan out, talk to Barla Von in the financial district. Rumor has it he's a representative for the Shadow Broker. If any information dealer has anything on Saren, he will, but it won't come cheap."

"Understood," Shepard said, catching sight of Nihlus stalking past.

"Good luck, Shepard," Anderson called to her as she hurried to catch up to the Spectre.

There was a low, intermittent growling coming from the turian as she fell in step beside him. "Do you need something, Shepard?" he asked her as they entered the elevator, his movements full of a leashed violence as he stalked to the controls.

"Your cooperation, if I ask the officer who was in charge of investigating Saren to continue his investigation."

"What makes you think he'll cooperate?" he asked her after a long, uncomfortable moment of study.

"He was arguing with the executor in public. More specifically, he was a turian arguing with his superior officer in public. If he'd do that without good reason, he wouldn't still be in C-Sec."

Nihlus's mandibles flickered thoughtfully. "Who is he?"

"Garrus Vakarian."

"Vakarian?" Nihlus asked sharply.

"Yes, why?"

"Because that's a name I've heard before. His father was a legend in C-Sec, but they say the son is a brash hothead. He's still young enough to be in the reserves."

"The reserves?" Shepard prompted.

"Every turian serves in the military until they're thirty. Not all of us spend it in the active forces, though. If there aren't any ongoing major conflicts, depending on your MOS and how long you've served, they'll offer you the option to be placed in a reserve unit. It leaves you free to take another job. If the rumors about his personality are true, I'd say that Vakarian the younger was feeling stifled. The Hierarchy runs you hard, without a lot of latitude for questioning your officers. You know it's a bad, bad day when chain of command breaks down. If he was any good, he was probably considered for Spectre status. They look for that kind of personality."

"Why's that?" Kaidan asked, falling in behind them as they elevator finally reached the base of the Tower.

"C-Sec? That's a turian model of how to deal with crime. The Spectres are an asari idea, modeled on their own justicars."

Kaidan made a thoughtful noise, then Williams spoke up. "You really mean _everyone_ serves in the military?" she asked incredulously.

Shepard glanced back at her. "It's not quite like it sounds," she answered her. "It's not as if they're all frontline combat troops or even involved in professions we'd even consider being "military". In the Hierarchy, the military is synonymous with government at any level. Their primarchs have always been active-duty generals and their colonies are administered by governor-generals. Their sanitation workers, their road workers, and even their schoolteachers are all active-duty military. Anything that we'd consider government funded." At Nihlus's puzzled glance, she said, "I'd never heard about moving people into reserve units, but I'm not completely unfamiliar with your service model."

Nihlus chuckled. "That would be because we like to pretend we're all good turians. The ones who opt for the reserves tend to be our artists and entrepreneurs, which are a significant minority. It's almost traditional to option for the reserves if you're going for C-Sec, though. They put you through a minimum of a year of cultural sensitivity training before they ever let you out in public and that's aside from having to learn a legal code that's supposed to let a half dozen species live peacefully on the galaxy's largest space station."

"So not exactly your average beat cops, then," Williams said wryly.

"Not exactly," Nihlus agreed. "I assume you have a plan, Shepard?"

"Yes. Step one involves returning to the _Normandy_ and changing into something that doesn't have my rank on the shoulders," she said, tugging at the high collar of her dress uniform for emphasis. "Step two is to divide and conquer. Kaidan, Williams, you'll pay a visit to Barla Von and get us a quote for what the Shadow Broker's services will cost us. Be polite, don't sign anything, and don't agree to any vague, open-ended favors."

"Well, that ruins my plans for the afternoon," Kaidan quipped. "We'll handle it, Commander. You and Nihlus are going to Chora's Den to talk to Harkin?"

"If Nihlus doesn't have other plans," she replied, glancing over at the turian.

He opened his jaws and flared his mandibles in the turian equivalent of a wry grin. "My plan involved a classier bar, but yours works."


	6. Hark, Hark, The Hounds Do Bark

A/N: I am taking liberties with the _Normandy'_ s layout. If we have enough room for a lab, there's a wardroom and staterooms for officers somewhere. Also, I think being asked to sleep in the open in what are essentially tilted coffins might be asking a little much of the crew, especially if we're talking months long deployments. So we'll pretend they have real, assigned racks where they can pretend to have privacy and personal space.

Also, I know that ME uses a simplified rank system that mashes the Navy/Marines together and seems to do away with the Army/Air Force entirely, but my military-beta threatened to jump ship if the Marines weren't recognized as a distinct branch. So, Ashley Williams is a Marine, Kaidan Alenko is Navy, and Shepard originally enlisted in the Marines, but switched branches because the N-program belongs to the Navy-sort of SEALs in space. And because ground and in-atmo air combat is still a thing, Army/Air Force still exist. If you have any further questions, feel free to ask.

As always, lines are borrowed directly from the games, but where they go is another story.

Absolute Magnitude

-Chapter Five-

Hark, Hark, The Hounds Do Bark

All appearance of amiable turian vanished the moment they entered what the crew had taken to calling "the retreat," which consisted of officers' staterooms and the Normandy's tiny wardroom.

The turian military often housed all but their very senior officers-their Captain and XO-with their units on smaller ships, but they also had more relaxed personal restrictions than the Alliance, who weren't about to allow over-familiarity to blur the line between officer and enlisted. They also tended to create their warships-or any of their ships large enough that they weren't intended to do unassisted ground landings-with tiny private rooms sharing communal heads and washrooms and common areas laid out in what they called _vicari_ , being that space didn't have the same issues with weightor frictionor even wind resistanceas atmo-bound vessels.

Shepard supposed that if you expected your entire population to serve a fifteen-year stint, allowing them privacy once they passed the rank of private was probably safer than trusting that every turian was somehow biologically suited for the concessions that came with military life.

Anderson never usually left the stateroom that doubled as his office on Deck 2, so he hadn't hesitated to offer his stateroom proper to Nihlus. Which was why Shepard was surprised when he followed her to the stateroom she shared with Dr. Chakwas, who was the only other female officer aboard the _Normandy_ with enough rank to merit a place in the staterooms.

(Anderson had told her-he'd briefed her when she'd been assigned, just as he'd been briefed when _irreconcilable differences_ of the likely to cause a political incident kind had seen the first captain relieved of duty-that the idea of separation by gender had baffled the turians during the design phase, but no one had been willing to explain that the idea of women as frontline combatants was still wasn't as automatic an assumption the way it was for turians. There were women on the Admiralty Board now and women captained warships, but no one had even seriously considered _merging_ the quarters for male and female crewmen. Humanity had grown considerably more egalitarian even before they'd escaped Earth and was moreso every year, but they had brought ancient, well-entrenched ideas about gender into space with them. The discovery of the asari-an entire race of nubile young females whose culture fed into some of humanity's worst stereotypes-had not helped matters.)

When he seemed content to stare broodingly down at his omnitool, she retrieved her unmarked armor from her locker. While she'd earned the N7 designation and its distinctive markings through a lot of pain, blood, and toil, there were times when displaying that insignia was more hindrance than help. After watching people react to the N7, it was almost strange how easily she passed unnoticed when she wore something a little more battered and less standard issue.

Shepard ignored the turian as she stripped and returned her uniform to its place, sliding into the skintight undersuit with the ease of long practice. She waited patiently as the systems came online and ran their automatic checks before she began interfacing the elements of her hardsuit. She favored stealth-tech and mobility over the ability to be a one-man wall, and despite the intentional scuffing that made her look more merc than soldier, it was good armor.

Shepard considered if it was worth the trouble of taking down her hair and braiding it. It was too long to meet regulations in anything but a bun-not only personal preference but officially encouraged for Spec-Ops infiltrators to blend into civilian populations-but it was oddly useful in disguising herself even when she wasn't trying to pass as a civilian. Aliens had a strangely difficult time identifying a human when their hair was styled differently.

Of course, given that such a dramatic change of appearance would require surgery for most other species, she supposed learning to identify people by the shape of their crest, head tentacles, cranial horns and so on might have been common sense before humanity and their hair came along.

Two minutes wasn't going to change the world in this case, she decided as she unpinned her hair and deftly braided it. Slightly more of a risk in a bar fight, but she didn't intend to cause trouble. Shepard turned back toward Nihlus, who had fixed that unnerving stare on her instead of his omnitool. "Did you really intend to go to a bar?" she asked him when it was clear he wasn't going to speak.

"I was going to meet with my contacts, before I remembered that Saren helped me to establish most of my best contacts," he growled in response.

"You think they'd feed you bad information?"

"I think that Saren would eliminate them and do it in such a way that it couldn't be proven to be anything but a string of tragic accidents," Nihlus said bitterly, hands clenching and unclenching. "And my contacts know it. I doubt I'd even be able to get any of them to agree to meet. He's crippled me without firing a single shot."

"You don't have _any_ contacts that he doesn't know about?"

"Some, yes, but no one with access to the kind of information we need. Anderson was right, when he said that the Shadow Broker would be the most likely to have any actionable intel. Unfortunately, I trusted Saren completely-he was my mentor and a friend," Nihlus replied, subharmonics broadcasting his distress. "My contacts to the Shadow Broker were first _his_ contact."

He shook his head roughly, mandibles fluttering in a gesture that she couldn't interpret. "You look thoroughly disreputable," he said, obviously finished with the topic of his contacts.

"That is the idea," Shepard agreed wryly. "If this is the kind of place I think it is, no one will look twice at a human mercenary, but they might have something to say about Commander Shepard."

"It's exactly the kind of place you think it is," Nihlus told her. "The drinks are cheap, the asari are plentiful, and the lights are turned down low."

"It's somewhat comforting to know that sleazy bars are universal and not just a human invention."

Nihlus waggled his mandibles at her, though it looked slightly forced. "Don't you know? Sensual dance is integral is asari cultural heritage," he teased.

"Oh, I know," Shepard said wryly. "I had an audience with the Consort before the hearing."

"That's...unexpected," Nihlus ventured after a silent moment. "She's been known to make full Spectres wait on her pleasure. Do you prefer asari neural entanglement exclusively? Because according to your medical reports..."

He trailed off, but Shepard knew his question. Due to a galaxy full of diseases that could be transmitted by bodily fluid exchange, the 'Are you sexually active?' question and its relatives became a permanent part of the medical record of anyone who served shipside, because while fraternization regs prevented officers from propositioning those under their command, the sailors not in a superior/inferior relationship were technically free to mingle in whatever way they pleased so long as it was not "prejudicial to good order and discipline"-though everyone was generally encouraged to keep such activities to shore leave. No one wanted to catch something exotic from a liaison and despite military cleanliness standards, there were some hardy things that could sweep through the closed confines of a ship.

Humans had feared the possibility of a global pandemic before they'd ever left Earth; the intergalactic medical community had been predicting the rise of a mutated panspecies supervirus for the past decade. It was another reason that asari were the favorite bed companions of every species-all of the pleasure, none of the risks.

She gave him a wry smile. "I'm celibate. And asari mind-sex still counts as sex."

"Really?"

"Religiously."

"...has anyone ever told you that human religions are very strange?"

"Repeatedly. Anyway," she said as she led them through the public areas of the ship, "the Consort decided that a Spectre-candidate in need of contacts and favors was also the best candidate for running an errand."

"And what would that errand be?" Nihlus asked.

"If it becomes necessary to involve you, I'll let you know," Shepard replied. "Just a heads-up that if it doesn't interfere with our pursuit of evidence against Saren, I'll cooperate with her request."

"Ambitious, multitasking when we're trying to stop Saren from whatever the hell he is doing with the geth."

"Favors with highly-placed people are an important form of currency," Shepard said with a one-shouldered shrug, then cocked her head to one side. "Although favors with lowly-placed people in important strategic positions are good too."

Nihlus chuckled, then made a thoughtful humming noise deep in his throat. "How do you intend to confront Harkin?" he asked as they took a transit taxi to the lower wards.

"Depends on Harkin. Do you know anything about him?"

"Even less than I know about Vakarian."

Shepard nodded. Judging by Anderson's description and his suspension despite political pressure exerted by Udina, Harkin was the kind of cop no one wanted to deal with unless they were looking to exploit him. "I'll defer to your superior experience if you want to convince him to part with the information," she offered.

Nihlus glanced sidelong at her. "That sounds gracious and properly deferential, right until I consider that leaves meto talk to the suspended C-Sec officer who apparently spends so much time in a seedy bar that its location has become his home address."

Shepard fixed a politely neutral expression on her face and didn't say another word until the transit taxi deposited them at their destination. Even from outside the club, she could hear the faint, insistent pulse of the music.

"Asari cultural heritage," she muttered just loud enough for Nihlus to hear.

"Asari cultural heritage," he agreed. "I haven't finished my observations, so you take the lead. I'll interfere if I think you're doing it wrong."

"Do you anticipate interfering?" she asked as she took him at his word, heading for the entrance. Chora's Den was located very near one of the taxi hubs and was accessible only by a bridge that spanned a structural gap that looked down into a very unpleasant drop. _Not much regard for drunken bar patrons going home_ , she thought with a flash of dark humor. Though there were some safety concessions, in the form of an above waist-height solid barrier on either side of the bridge. The barrier to their left took an abrupt right turn at the end of the bridge, continuing to herd pedestrians up the ramp leading into Chora's Den.

"Let's just say you're older and more experienced than most of the turian Spectre-candidates and I'm nicer than Saren," he replied. She saw him tense in her peripheral vision and then disappear as he came to a full halt and she instantly had a hand on her sidearm, tracking movement across the bridge, over on the ramp outside the entrance, that was too intent to be casual. The weapons they were drawing were another easy clue that they weren't dealing with bar patrons.

 _Three gunmen,_ she thought to herself as her shoulder scraped against the bridge railing as she threw herself into cover, moving quick and low and closing the distance with their attackers. _Not enough to guarantee take-down of a Spectre-whoever these men were here for, it wasn't us, though we might come as a nice bonus if they can bring us down if they're working for Saren._

Nihlus held back at the junction of the platform and bridge, drawing their fire, relying on his assault rifle and firing in short bursts as he popped above cover. Judging by the cry of pain, he got past the shields of at least one of their attackers, but Shepard was focused on maintaining control of their cover. If they managed to round the edge of the barrier, they'd have to depend entirely on their kinetic shields-there was nowhere to shelter on the bridge itself and it would be a long retreat to the taxi hub.

When she reached the end of the bridge, she dared chance a glimpse around the edge of the barrier while all three of the hostiles were occupied with returning fire at Nihlus, advancing as they did so. Which did nothing for their accuracy, but it did make the Spectre keep his head down as he waited for his own assault rifle to cool. Less than thirty seconds before she would come face-to-crotch with the leading hostile.

His leg rounded the cover before the rest of him and, bracing her weight on her hands, Shepard kicked out and caught the side of his knee. The sound it made was something wet and solid, almost something you could choke on as you tried to swallow it down. His rifle fell from his fingers as he tried to curl his whole body instinctively around the savaged joint. Her hand streaked out, gauntlet closing on a ridge that marked where helmet sealed to hardsuit and it was by that grip she yanked him forward. Unable to compensate for the weight shift, he sprawled next to her. Hand slamming down on the back of his helmet so that he couldn't rise, she nestled her pistol against the back of his neck. Once, twice, his body jerked beneath her hand and then he was still.

Shoving the body carelessly to one side, she rose out of cover. Keying her omnitool with her off hand, she held her pistol steady in the same hand wreathed in the omnitool holoface. As soon as she launched the program and saw the telltale shimmer of a shields failure, Shepard put four rounds in a tight cluster in the face of a second gunman's helmet.

The first only caused radiating cracks in the surface, the second pushed them deeper, but the third and fourth thudded home. Shepard stayed above cover, and as her hand came back from where it had been cupping the butt of the pistol for greater stability, she activated her overload program in two keystrokes. "Nihlus!" she barked and was answered by gunfire.

Keeping low, she checked around the corner again and found that their third hostile, who was bleeding profusely from a wound in his shoulder-Nihlus had apparently been targeting the vulnerable seams in his armor. He was sheltering behind the wall that enclosed the ramp leading into the club and didn't look as if he intended to attempt anything further until his shields restored themselves. Shepard measured the distance between them, the make and model of his assault rifle, and the integrity her own shields.

 _Take him alive or take him out?_ She had to decide, and quickly, if he'd provide actionable intel. She risked another glance and this time caught sight of an insignia she recognized. _Mercenary. Disposable resource. He might not know who they're working for, but he'll know what they're looking for._

Timing her sprint on another exchange of fire as Nihlus tried to flush him out, closing as he did so, Shepard burst from cover and had the mercenary down, his gun hand twisted at an uncomfortable angle and her knee in his back, before he could fire a single shot.

He was cursing her soundly and she applied enough pressure to make him gasp. "I know which group you belong to and I have a good idea who you're working for. Now, you have a choice. You live and go to C-Sec, or you die right here. Who or what were you here looking for?"

Shepard resisted the urge to apply further pressure when he was silent. Torture was against her rules; if she killed, she was going to do it cleanly. And the more she wanted to do it, the more convinced she was that it was a very good rule.

Finally, he spoke. "We were here looking for a quarian. A young female. We were shown her picture and yours, told to eliminate you and bring her."

"Thank you," Shepard said, relaxing her hold. But before she could let him go, an assault rifle barrel came to rest on the back on his neck. A three-round burst had red blood spilling onto the floor. Shepard had went very still at the sound of the first gunshot and now she stood up very carefully.

She met Nihlus's eyes. "I respect your judgment as the senior Spectre," she said quietly. "But next time, please tell me if you don't intend to leave anyone alive. My only saving grace with the Hierarchy is that I never offered surrender on Torfan-if I make an offer, I make it in good faith."

If he'd heard her and executed the merc anyway, it told her exactly why the Hierarchy had difficulties with him despite his skills. After Torfan, the turians hadn't been able to decide whether to applaud her thoroughness or despise her for breaking what they considered a sacred trust. Offering and accepting surrender and keeping the terms of treaties were almost religious concepts to them, presided over by very powerful spirits.

If she'd offered surrender to the batarians and then killed them, the turian Hierarchy might have declared her _bellua sacer_ , which translators mostly rendered as "oathbreaker" to get the same sense of a cultural invective without the benefit of the sub- and superscripts that replaced subvocal cues in the written turian language. Doing so as an individual would have unpleasant but not insurmountable repercussions, especially because she was human, but as a commanding officer, they'd have objected very strongly to her appointment as XO of the _Normandy_ and might have refused any public dealings with her _._

Spectres existed outside that system of expectations, though that alone was cause enough for a lot of turians to mistrust them. Given Nihlus's silence and his expression, which showed not an iota of remorse, she could understand that.

She crouched next to the corpse and began searching the three bodies with the efficacy of long practice.

"Anything?" Nihlus asked when she'd finished the last body.

"The usual merc-kit-disposable credit chits, multiple IDs of varying quality, the man on your left was a narcotics user," Shepard said as she rose.

Nihlus stared down at them thoughtfully, then his eyes rose to meet hers. "Let's move on. Saren's not stupid enough to be traced through a third-rate merc group."

"Agreed," Shepard said, stepping away from the body she'd been crouched over and moving toward the Den's entrance.

"I'll drop an anonymous tip with C-Sec about the bodies," Nihlus murmured as he keyed in the message on his omnitool, but she almost couldn't hear him over the wash of music that greeted her as the door hissed open. Throbbing, pulsing music, for the benefit of the asari who were writhing atop the inner circle of the bar that dominated the club. The light was low and blue, except were the wall behind the bar glowed a reddish-pink, which made her almost feel like they were underwater.

Despite the music they'd been able to hear outside the club, the noise level inside was more bearable than she'd expected-enticement instead of overflow. That made her curious as to why club security hadn't at least taken a glance outside at the sound of gunshots, but as they passed a pair of krogan, she understood that they'd been otherwise occupied. Not her problem, however.

She keyed up an extranet search, intending to pull a photo of Harkin if she could, but Nihlus's hand came down on her shoulder.

"A human drinking in a C-Sec duty uniform," he said, gesturing to a man sitting alone at a table. "I think the odds are good that he's our target."

Shepard nodded, clenching the muscles in her jaw to keep her expression neutral as their target's eyes swept over her from head to crotch like she was something bought and paid for. "Hey there, sweetheart," he called out when she drew closer. "You looking for some fun? 'Cause I gotta say that you make body armor look _good._ Why don't you sit your sweet little ass down beside old Harkin and forget about your bodyguard there? Have a drink and we'll see where this goes."

Shepard couldn't remember the last time she'd been so bluntly propositioned. "No thanks," she said curtly, which made Harkin shrug faintly.

"Your loss. But if you aren't here to see me for a good time, you want something else from me. I think that merits you paying for the drinks," he drawled without removing his arm from where he had it slung over the back of a chair.

Shepard caught the attention of one of the waitresses, handing over one of the credit chits she'd palmed from the mercenaries' bodies. She'd thought the conversation might go this way if Harkin proved to be the kind of dirty cop who could be bought. And she enjoyed the irony of Saren providing the operating fund for their pursuit of him.

Harkin just leered at her until his drink was delivered. "Alright," he said, waving his hand toward the seat across from him. "Let's hear it."

"I'm looking for a turian named Garrus Vakarian."

Harkin's brows rose and he took a leisurely sip of something that all but glowed in the dark. "Garrus, huh?" he said. And then he abruptly proved why he'd been one of the first humans in C-Sec. "With your friend there being a Spectre with a certain reputation, you must be one of Anderson's crew. Given that scar," he moved a hand to trace a line that began at his jaw, crossed the bridge of his nose, nearly touched the eye and continued across his forehead into his hairline, "you're Commander Shepard. Couldn't see it when you first came in. It's healed up nice. And that means that the poor bastard's still trying to bring Saren down, eh?" He shook his head, visibly amused. "Still blaming Saren for washing out of his Spectre audition. Can't accept that even the high and mighty _Captain_ Anderson is subject to failure, just like the rest of us. I know where Garrus is."

"You know his location just like that?" Nihlus rasped, breaking his silence from where he stood at Shepard's shoulder. "No need to contact anyone?"

Harkin sneered up at the turian. "I might be on the executor's shit-list, but I have ears, two of 'em, and I know how to use 'em. That's how I lasted twenty years in C-Sec with you damn aliens looking down on me. Garrus is a good cop for his age and a damn sight more pleasant than his father, but he didn't inherit much of his control. He's sloppy when he's upset. I'd bet my own credits that I'm not the only one who knows his location-or the only one who knows how close he thought he was to finding evidence on Saren."

Shepard and Nihlus exchanged a speaking glance. If one of those officers had fed information to Saren, there might already be more mercenaries pursuing Vakarian.

"So, what's your price?" Nihlus demanded.

Harkin's sneer only deepened. "The executor wouldn't just have suspended me, he would have flayed me and hung me out to dry if he thought I was selling out fellow officers. Garrus was sniffing around Dr. Michel's office. She runs a med clinic on the other side of the wards. Last I heard, he going back to follow-up on a new development."

Shepard stood. "Thank you for your time," she said.

Harkin scoffed. "Just go."

Shepard did as he suggested. She contacted Kaidan as they exited Chora's Den. "What's the word on the Shadow Broker's assistance?"

"That it apparently doesn't pay to cross him. Or her. Or them. One of his informants was apparently going to turn an asset over to Saren instead of the Broker, so he took a hit out on him with a krogan merc."

"Who's the informant?"

"A human named Fist, runs a bar named Chora's Den. Sound familiar, Commander?" he asked wryly.

"Yes. And I might have seen our krogan."

"Barla Von said he was picked up by C-Sec, implied that we might want to pick him up when we go see Fist."

"Other than making certain the Broker's contract is filled, he suggest any other reasons that it would be a good idea to bring along the krogan?" Shepard asked as Nihlus gave instructions to the transit taxi's VI.

"Fist is apparently something of a small-time crime lord. More drugs running than gun smuggling, but you can't have a drug trade without a side of gun violence," Kaidan said.

Shepard made a thoughtful noise. "Alright. Go down to C-Sec, feel out the krogan. If you think he's an asset, bring him. If they've taken him into custody and assessed a fine, I'll forward you the credits. Keep him out of Chora's Den until Nihlus and I rendezvous with you."

"What, not trusting that a krogan won't ask questions first?" Kaidan teased lightly. "Williams and I will take care of it."

"You're bringing in a krogan?" Nihlus asked incredulously when she'd ended the connection.

"I am sending Kaidan in to assess a krogan," Shepard corrected. "You've met Kaidan. You think he's going to loose someone uncontrollable in a bar full of civilians? And," she added, "if it turns out this krogan is the same krogan from the club, he walked away from a refusal without turning it into a fight. Says something about his self-control."

"'Self-control' and 'krogan' are mutually exclusive."


	7. Hostage Situations

Absolute Magnitude

-Chapter Six-

Hostage Situations

The first thing Shepard noticed as the door of the clinic slid open was the large turian crouched behind some sort of massive piece of medical scanning equipment. The second thing she noticed were the unarmored but well-armed humans threatening a woman in the back of the clinic, which unfortunately came at almost the same moment she was seen. The man nearest the doctor grabbed her to his chest, whipping out a pistol and brandishing it in Shepard's direction.

"Who are you?" the man demanded.

"Don't you know you lock the door during these kinds of things?" Shepard replied as she counted the number of armed men they had to put down without a stray bullet catching the civilian. Before she had a chance to try talking the men down-playing the merc who'd just happened to stumble in and wasn't at all invested in the life of the doctor except for looking to use her services-Vakarian surged up out of cover and nailed the thug holding the doctor hostage.

No armor meant no shields, so the thug's right eye was suddenly a leaky, empty cavity that revealed the path his bullet had taken. The doctor was rattled enough that she just hunkered down in place, hands fisting over her ears like it would somehow provide protection against the gunfire that was suddenly echoing in the enclosed space. There were five hostiles left when the C-Sec officer had taken his shot and Shepard sprinted forward, sliding across the scanning equipment.

She focused her attention on the ones who'd retreated behind a structural support column, trusting Nihlus to quickly round the equipment and take care of the thugs closer to the doctor. She held her fire, letting her shields prove the veracity of the manufacturers claims-not only was medical equipment massively overpriced, there tended to be less-than-bulletproof cabinets of things like oxygen in clinics like these.

Almost before her feet touched floor on the other side of the scanner, she caught the one sheltering behind the column in the shoulder and the force of it was enough to send him stumbling back just that one step she needed to make a clear head-shot. She turned her gun on his partner almost before his body finished sagging to the ground. The second gunman had thrown himself away from the pillar to shelter badly behind a stack of half-unpacked medical supplies. He panicked, dropping his pistol and pulling out an SMG.

"God save us all from idiots who want to use automatic weapons," Shepard hissed under her breath as she stepped directly into his path of fire, knowing that an unlucky ricochet would be all it took to leave them sans a Wards doctor. Her kinetic barriers absorbed the momentum, leaving the bullets to drop harmlessly at her feet as she took the three steps it took to give her a good enough opening to put a bullet in his right temple. For a second, she didn't think his finger was going to release the trigger mechanism, pulled tight in death instead of releasing, but then the weapon overheated and locked up.

Between the two of them, Nihlus and Vakarian had the others already down, flanking the doctor who was now shakily rising to her feet.

"Perfect timing, Shepard," Vakarian said. "Gave me a clear shot at that bastard."

"Nice shot," Nihlus replied snidely before Shepard could respond, "But I'm curious what your plan was if we hadn't shown up."

Vakarian shifted a little uncomfortably at the rebuke, then rallied, "Sometimes you get lucky," he said, then turned his attention to making certain the doctor hadn't been hurt. Shepard felt her brows rise at what was as good as a blatant admission that they could have walked in on a far different scene if they'd come a little later.

Though their Ward doctor hadn't had enough composure to seek shelter during the firefight, now that the gunfire had stopped, she was quickly recovering. Or at least doing a good job of pretending. She _did_ run a clinic in a slightly disreputable section of the Wards-posturing with guns might have been something she'd encountered before, though it might never have progressed to actual shooting.

Shepard was careful to temper her voice when she spoke to the doctor. "It looked like they were threatening you when we came in. They were saying something about Officer Vakarian...?"

The doctor nodded, sliding her hands up and down her upper arms in a self-comforting gesture. "They work for Fist," she said, and Shepard glanced to Nihlus and raised her eyebrows meaningfully, gaze shifting to the doctor as she went on, "They wanted to shut me up, keep me from telling Garrus about the quarian."

And there it was, all the pieces assembled in their little puzzle. A crime lord who'd gone against the Shadow Broker to side with Saren, a rogue Spectre who'd sent out mercenaries of his own because he didn't trust someone who'd double-cross the most powerful information broker in the galaxy, and a quarian who had something that both the Shadow Broker and Saren wanted. Whatever Saren had offered Fist, Shepard hoped he'd enjoyed his reward while he could-he'd as good as signed his own execution warrant.

Shepard was silent as the doctor went on to explain the circumstances of her meeting with the quarian and was quietly impressed with her competence-she doubted many doctors on the Citadel knew how to treat quarians. The long and short of it was that the quarian had been shot and during her treatment, she'd asked about the Shadow Broker, intimated she had something valuable enough to exchange for safety. Dr. Chloe Michel had sent her on to Fist, who was apparently an open agent of the Shadow Broker.

"Not any more," Vakarian spoke up. "Now he works for Saren, and the Shadow Broker isn't too happy about it."

"We know," Nihlus said dryly.

"Fist betrayed the Shadow Broker? That's stupid, even for him. Saren must have made him quite the offer," Dr. Michel commented, one hand coming up to press a fisted hand worriedly against her lips.

"Whatever the quarian has, Saren has committed enough resources to retrieving her to make it worth our time to get there first. She didn't mention what sort of information it was?" Shepard pressed.

The doctor's brows furrowed, then relaxed as she volunteered, "Yes! She did. She was fevered when she arrived-standard quarian autoimmune response to a suitbreach-she kept talking about the geth. Once I'd brought the fever down, she didn't want to explain. Insisted it was dangerous."

"If her evidence can link Saren to the geth, there's no way the Council could ignore this!" Vakarian insisted, which Shepard hoped was the case.

"Time to retrace our steps," she said to Nihlus.

Who gave the turian equivalent of a wry grin. "Back to the bar," he agreed. "If that krogan you ordered hasn't already slaughtered a path to Fist and taken out our best lead."

"...you're going to hold the krogan against me?" she asked him dryly.

"If it doesn't work out? Yes," he replied unabashedly.

"I'll keep that in mind. I'm sure that Officer Vakarian can arrange for some sort of protection for you until we get this taken care of, ma'am," she said to the doctor. She looked at Vakarian. "Can you arrange it in the transit taxi? Nihlus will take care of authorizing the investigation, but this has to hold up in court. If they've already got you flagged for going on an unauthorized witchhunt, we're going to face accusations of manufacturing or tampering with evidence. This they might excuse. Did you contact Officer Vakarian after he originally contacted you? Tell him you felt concerned about your safety?" This she addressed to Dr. Michel, who gave her a startled, jerky nod.

"Good," Shepard replied shortly, turning her attention back to the turian. "We have a Spectre, so we don't need a warrant to enter Fist's place of business. When we reach the quarian, any evidence she has will be turned immediately over to you and you will immediately follow C-Sec procedure to establish chain of evidence, understood?"

She'd automatically fallen into the tone she used to make new soldiers fall in line, a close, slightly kinder cousin to the one she'd used to guide her men during the hell of Torfan. Vakarian responded to it, drawing himself up his full height. "Understood, ma'am," he rasped, hand rising like he might salute-turians brought a fisted hand over their keelbone. Then he looked faintly sheepish. "Shepard," he amended.

She couldn't help that one corner of her lips tugged upwards in a good humor that felt at odds with the situation. Most of what she knew of turians came from books about their tactics and their history, observation through a scope, or hardened soldiers or mercenaries. She'd never met one who seemed so...young , for lack of a better word. "It's alright-I answer to ma'am," she told him as she stepped aside to let him take the back seat of the transit taxi.

She heard Nihlus scoff softly, but it sounded amused rather than disdainful.

"Yes, ma'am," Vakarian repeated, humor saturating his subharmonics. "...so, neither of you seemed very surprised at all this. What with Fist and everything."

"We've already been in contact with another Shadow Broker agent," Nihlus replied. "So we knew about Fist. We'd already heard about the quarian as well, from a mercenary who was likely hired by Saren."

Vakarian made a trill of interest-the vocal range of turians, she was coming to find, wasn't dissimilar to a bird's, but much thicker vocal folds made the pitch closer to a big cat's or what the sound engineers in Hollywood had always thought dinosaurs might sound like. "Would the mercenary be willing to testify before the council?" Vakarian asked.

"The mercenary is dead," Shepard answered tonelessly.

An awkward silence descended in the cab, but the ride was thankfully short. Kaidan's group was waiting at the taxi hub and accompanying them was the large krogan that she'd seen in the club earlier. He had deep and very clear facial scarring, which she'd heard was supposed to be attractive. He also had a large hump; like camels, krogan stored fat in their humps as a survival mechanism and given how they'd essentially nuked themselves back to the Stone Age before salarian intervention, hump size had developed into an important social marker.

Off their home planet, it became less so, but from the way he carried himself now and the behavior she'd seen earlier, he was high enough in the order of things to not need to posture aggressively. A little posturing was unavoidable. What had Warlord Kitanghur said? _The weak are meat and the strong eat._

Nihlus was lurking at her shoulder, silently disapproving, but Shepard ignored him and approached the others. "So you're the leader, huh?" the krogan grunted as he rose from where he'd been slouched against the wall. He grinned. "At least they've got the sense to follow the one with the good scars," he said, tapping his own facial scarring meaningfully. "I'm Urdnot Wrex."

If he knew how she'd gotten that scar, Shepard thought wryly, he'd have been less impressed. After all, a panicking, disoriented turian captive who'd had his hands so badly broken that he could only extend one finger to claw at her face wasn't exactly an imposing opponent. She'd only taken her helmet off in an attempt to convey that she wasn't batarian and wasn't there to hurt him. He wrote her faithfully every _Compitarsus._

"Commander Shepard, Alliance Navy," she replied. "I assume Kaidan had time to brief you?"

"I know who you are. Your lieutenant used your name to bring me in on this, told me that you have some questions you wanted to ask Fist before I took off half his face with my shotgun. That ain't no hide off my hump," Wrex said, crossing thick arms across a powerful chest. "Just so you know that Fist is a dead man."

Shepard nodded, though she thought privately he'd have to be faster on the trigger than Nihlus if past behavior was anything to go by. "Good. Kaidan, Williams, when we go in, you two will remain at the entrance to the 'employee only' area. I don't want any surprise visitors and I trust that the two of you will be able to control a nervous crowd-keep in mind where we are."

"Should we expect the civilians to be armed?" Williams asked dutifully, though she looked slightly skeptical of the thought of a drunken crowd being a threat to a pair of well-armed, well-trained servicemen.

Shepard was sharply reminded that Williams had admitted she'd seen only groundside garrisons without much action, but from Kaidan's sober look, he knew exactly what they might be facing.

"Probably, possibly illegally-keep in mind that this is the Citadel," Vakarian answered her. "There are gun mods being traded here from every independent arms manufacturer in the galaxy who thinks that the Council shouldn't have the right to tell them just how messily they can kill each other."

"Great," Williams drawled, "Too bad I left my riot gear back on the ship." There was that same stiffness in her stance that Shepard had noted whenever she'd noticed Nihlus nearby. Ashley Williams was made uncomfortable by turians, but she was putting a lot of effort into being professional about it.

Vakarian chuckled, either overlooking or ignoring the uneasiness of the human.

"So you're taking two turians and a krogan into a bar-sounds like the start of a bad joke," Nihlus muttered.

"Only if anyone other than the krogan walks out alive," Wrex said. "Otherwise that's what passes for good humor on Tunchanka."

Before the two could escalate into anything more than snide remarks, Shepard strode away toward her destination. They fell in quickly enough after that, neither willing to let the other have an advantage. She told herself that mercenary groups managed multispecies cohesiveness all the time, but then again they tended to be there _voluntarily._

There was one thing she had to say about krogans-once their services were bought and paid for, they tended to stay bought, even against bad odds. "I told you to stay away, Wrex," the krogan who'd sent Wrex away earlier growled as the krogan in question shouldered his way to the front of their group.

"Eyes open-the barkeeper has his hand under the bar and he looks a little twitchy," Vakarian said softly from somewhere behind her shoulder.

"Another one on this side," Kaidan reported. "Dressed like a bouncer, but given our new insight into Fist's profession, I'm thinking enforcer."

"Crowd's looking a little restless," Williams added.

Shepard didn't need to be told about the mood of the crowd shifting-she could already hear it, the tempo of conversation changing, people pushing themselves to their feet. If their need weren't so pressing, she'd suggest they wait to question Fist somewhere more private and with less chance of explosive violence, but her options were limited. The part of her mind that existed only to protect itself shored up the steely walls that kept her from regret. "Bring him down," she told Wrex, who gave the other krogan a wide and toothy grin before he commenced firing.

The blast of a shotgun ringing in her ears despite the mandatory auditory implants, Shepard agilely boosted herself atop the bar, where she stared down the barkeep, who stepped away from her until his back impacted the wall behind the bar. "Ladies and gentlemen," she said, addressing the crowd, "I'm sorry to cut your evening short, but I'll ask you to leave this establishment in a calm and orderly fashion. You may take your drinks and dancers with you," she finished on a wry note.

The exit was not precisely calm nor orderly, except for the turian patrons, but it did leave the bar mostly empty. What remained were a couple krogan-one of whom was human culture conversant enough to toast her-who clearly thought that the fight was better than the asari and more thugs who thought Fist was someone worth dying for. The barkeep tried to lunge for the gun beneath the bar, but Shepard leapt on him, which also put her safely behind cover as people around the room opened fire.

They landed hard on the floor and the man wheezed desperately for breath beneath her, eyes so wide she could see the white of his sclera on every side of his pupil. She jabbed him in the throat once, twice, his Adam's apple threatening to kiss his spine, trachea collapsing beneath the force of her blows. His skin was already flushed red, but now he shaded toward purple as he fought to breathe.

Then she was off, surging back over the bar as Wrex's shotgun continued to roar. He used his greater mass like a battering ram, knocking the other krogan back. The two turians moved forward into the gap, assault rifles at the ready, and they were already firing on hostiles by the time Shepard made the door, Kaidan and Williams moving to flank the entrance as they put down the last of the enforcers. She felt the press of Wrex's bulk against her back as he finally convinced his opponent that he was dead and should stay down, and she stepped aside as she used her off-hand to key her omnitool, dominant hand bringing her pistol to bear. She winced as Wrex bellowed, right at her shoulder, and charged forward into the room.

It was a little like hunting, Wrex flushing thugs up out of cover where they were vulnerable to the fire of her allies, who were more than a credit to turian military training. All of Fist's underlings, except for that first krogan, were human and poorly armored. Shepard was grateful for the oversight, which meant that their advance through the room was brutal and quick. Wrex grunted as the last of the bodies fell. "Che, that was hardly even fun," he said as the wrenched the next door open, shotgun falling back into the ready position in his hand. "Look at these two in here," he called to her. "They're shivering so hard I don't think they could even hit me at this range. What do you think, Shepard? Should I be nice, let them take a free shot or two?"

He stepped aside as Shepard came up behind him and she was confronted by two men who _clearly_ had no idea what they were doing. Her eyes quickly swept the room behind them and discovered neatly inventoried supplies. "I don't kill stock boys if I can help it," she told the two workers. "Take the rest of the evening off. A business like this? You'll have a new boss by next week."

The two men exchanged a glance and dropped their weapons, which made Shepard wince. Luckily, they didn't accidentally discharge and the two men scampered off toward the outer room, where the sound of gunfire had died down.

"Well, you're no fun," Wrex commented teasingly. "We could have messed with them a little bit, even if you were going to let them go."

"Strange," Shepard replied as she lead them through the room, "how much that does not appeal to me." The next door was locked electronically, but Shepard was underwhelmed by the security firewalls. It took her less than twenty seconds to have them through the door, the two turians flanking her as Wrex stalked first into the room, his biotics flaring as he snatched one of Fist's enforcers and slammed him into the wall.

They were getting closer to Fist-they were in some sort of private entertainment area, with two semi-circular couches gathered close to a round table. High-stakes Skyllian Five? Board meetings for the local red sand import/export business? Private VIP dances where there were fewer clothes and fewer boundaries?

"Does that count as knocking?" he sneered at someone, but Shepard's attention was focused on eliminating the rest of Fist's guards in this inner sanctum, who were actually armored and slightly better trained than the ones who'd tried to stop them in the out rooms. For lack of cover, Nihlus and Vakarian went down on one knee to minimize their profiles.

Shepard took the opposite approach, dashing forward, hand flickering through another two-stroke pattern on her omnitool interface. Her target's gun jammed and he looked down instinctively in betrayal, which was why he didn't see her pistol as it whipped through the air to impact his temple with a meaty _thunk_. Kinetic barriers had been developed to stop bullets-slower objects didn't register, because otherwise it would be impossible to interact with an environment while in armor.

When Wrex's shotgun roared again, she glanced over the rest of the room. As his target clutched at his belly and sunk to his knees, Wrex's fist came down to smash his face against the floor so hard he rebounded. He'd been the last enemy standing.

She had a moment's triumph before her mind registered the sound of machinery. Some part of her was utterly unsurprised as she watched automated defense turrets slide out of the floor. The rest of her was already shoving her body into action, pitching herself over the nearest couch in the very sleek, very modern sort of seating arrangement that almost echoed the circular bar in the first room. She hooked the table at the center with her leg as she rolled beneath it, causing it to come crashing down just as the turrets opened fire.

With a cheap enough target acquisition matrix, diffusing her body heat behind solid objects would have been enough to confuse the sensors, but as bullets slammed into her makeshift shelter, it was clear that Fist had invested plenty of credits into his fail-safe line of defense.

"Overload the shields," Wrex snarled at her as his huge body joined hers behind what felt like an increasingly small table.

"Say please," she replied tartly as she did as he'd demanded. She exchanged her pistol for her sniper rifle, sucking in a deep breath before standing upright and using the reflex sight she'd mounted atop her scope to sight quickly. She was vaguely surprised when its shields stuttered and fell before she overcame the resistance of the trigger. As soon she'd counted the one, two beat that was the heartbeat of her sniper rifle's cooldown, she finished off the turrent that Wrex had been antagonizing with his shotgun. "Thanks for the assist," she said as she glanced back at the turians. It was Vakarian who nodded, silently accepting the gratitude.

"It was a nice welcoming party," Shepard said as she turned back toward the inner doors. "Let's go thank our host."

"I didn't think krogans took cover," Nihlus commented to Wrex, who snorted.

"I like this set of armor. It doesn't regen like a krogan," he said pointedly. But he took point, charging the door, which couldn't take the weight and force of a full-grown krogan, crumpling inward. The man inside was sheltering behind a desk, and he stood and tried to unload his clip into Wrex, but the krogan's momentum wasn't stopped by the door and his biotics manifested and solidified into an extra barrier. His boots pounded across the floor and Wrex slammed his hand into the underside of the desk, spinning it into Fist.

It wasn't heavy enough to trap him, but it was heavy enough to make rising awkward. He didn't even try. "Wait!" he bleated, "Don't kill me! I surrender!"

"There's a quarian," Nihlus replied, "tell us where she is."

"She's not here," Fist said. "I don't know where she is. That's the truth!"

"That's your question, there's your answer," Wrex grunted, extended his shotgun so that it wasn't more than a foot and half from Fist's face. "Let me save us all some time and kill him now."

"Wait, wait" Fist protested. "I don't know where the quarian is, but I know where you can find her. She didn't want to negotiate with me-wanted to offer her information to the Shadow Broker in person."

Wrex scoffed. "Every idiot knows that _no one_ meets the Broker face-to-face."

"She's young," Fist offered desperately. "I think this is her first time away from the Flotilla. I told her I'd sat up a meeting. Only it'll be with Saren's agents."

"Where?" Shepard prompted sharply.

When Fist hesitated, Nihlus stepped forward. "You should answer her," he rumbled. "I won't ask as nicely."

"Here on the wards. The back alley by the markets. She's supposed to be meeting them now. If you hurry-" whatever else he'd been about to say was drowned out by the shotgun blast.

"What are you doing?" Garrus demanded.

"He said to hurry," Wrex replied unperturbedly. "I'm saving you time."

"Kaidan, Williams?" Shepard activated her comm as Nihlus turned wordlessly to the door. She received an acknowledgement immediately. "Fall in with our Spectre when you see him-you're going to that alley behind the markets."

"Yes, ma'am," they chorused in her ear as Shepard stepped around Fist's body to where his personal terminal had landed when Wrex had flipped the desk.

"Shepard?" Vakarian asked anxiously.

"Taking the hard drive," she answered him shortly. "If we're lucky, it contains a record of what Saren offered Fist. If it was money, even if it doesn't lead directly to Saren, if he paid him out of an account-"

"You might have a better idea what you're facing, what Saren's funding," he finished for her.

It didn't take her long to retrieve the drive, but she still jogged out of Chora's Den. "Fastest route to our destination, Vakarian?" she asked as the officer drew level with her shoulder.

"This way," he said, taking off on foot. Shepard followed, but she was surprised to hear Wrex's heavy footsteps behind them.

Despite their haste, Nihlus was already killing people by the time they'd arrived. The group wasn't large, to avoid spooking their target, but they were well-trained enough that though it was a short firefight, it was brutal in its lack of cover. By the time the last merc had finished sputtering bloody froth, her armor had gained a few more impact craters to add to its disreputable appearance.

"Fist set me up! I knew I couldn't trust him!" The young quarian's outrage permeated every word. The heat of her anger hadn't completed evaporated when she spoke again. "And who are all of you?" she demanded, then shifted uncomfortably as she appeared to rethink her tone. "Not that I don't appreciate the help."

"This is Nihlus Kryik, a Council Spectre," Shepard said, when she'd glanced over to Nihlus and he flexed a mandible toward the quarian. "I'm Commander Shepard, Systems Alliance. We're spearheading an investigation into Saren Arterius. We know he's gone rogue, but we can't prove it. Our trail led us to you. I'm hoping that you can help us."

The quarian nodded slowly. "Yes," she said. "I think I can. It will give me an opportunity to repay you for saving my life. But not here."

Shepard nodded. "This is Officer Garrus Vakarian," she said, introducing the turian, who took a half-step forward. "He's C-Sec-it'll be to him you'll officially turn your evidence over to." She read discomfort in the quarian's body language and quickly intuited the cause.

So did Vakarian. "We can take her to the embassy suites," he offered, coming to the same conclusion she had, that the quarian would be uncomfortable with the idea of going to the Academy. "Your ambassador will doubtless want to hear this before he demands another hearing. From there, it will be easy for me to coordinate with the Executor."

"I understand," the quarian replied, a little of her defensiveness evaporating, leaving earnestness in its stead. "Believe me, I will be more than happy to help bring Saren down."

Codex Entry:

 _Compitarsus_ : The turian spirit of crossroads, who lent its name to a day which is given over to reflecting on those who guided you during the crossroads of your life. It is traditional to write letters to the mentors you are most grateful to and detail what has happened in your life since they last helped shape it. Those in public service such as fire fighters, law enforcement officers, and teachers often receive dozens of letters after _Compitarsus._ Other than handwritten letters giving way in many cases to e-mail, this tradition is relatively unchanged since antiquity and is widely practiced in Hierarchy space.


	8. Sentinel Against Disaster (Part I)

Absolute Magnitude

-Chapter Seven-

Sentinel Against Disaster (Part I)

The decision of the Council still echoed in her ears hours after the trial had finished, even after she'd reported back to Udina's office after a biometrics assay thorough enough that she was certain that the Citadel could replicate her down to her brain patterns. At least she'd been able to shed her dress uniform for something more comfortable.

The fact that she was the first human Spectre had lost a bit of its prestige and mystery after she'd spent so much time being prodded by asari and salarians, but it had been no clean appointment to begin with. After they'd declared Saren rogue, they'd wanted Nihlus to pursue and apprehend him aboard the _Normandy_. Udina had protested that handing over the Alliance's _extremely_ expensive frigate for an undetermined length of time went well beyond "reasonable accommodation". She could still hear the tinge of smug self-satisfaction when he'd went on to point out that they would, however, be pleased to entrust her to a _human_ Spectre.

She didn't doubt that they would be made to answer for that particular victory, because not one of the Councilors had looked pleased by being forced to concede a Spectre appointment. Their most immediate retaliation had been to assign Nihlus to accompany her. _Supervise her, subvert her command, see her permanently lost before Saren was apprehended_ were among the likely private instructions he was receiving, but as entertaining as those thoughts were, she'd left them behind as she crossed the ambassador's threshold.

Udina was seated at his desk and merely glanced up as she entered, but Anderson turned from where he'd been enjoying the view from the balcony. "Welcome back, Shepard," he said.

"Sit down," Udina said much more brusquely. "Commander, Anderson will be turning his command of the Normandy over to you."

Shepard's brows furrowed and Anderson answered the question she hadn't yet asked. "If we're really facing a full-scale geth invasion, the Alliance has better uses for me than playing taxi driver for your investigation," he told her not unkindly.

"Once the shakedown cruise was finished and we saw you on your Spectre appointment," Udina said, "Alliance Command always intended to make the Normandy the base of a recon team. That's off the table for the moment. But you're going to need personnel. There's no getting around that."

"Alliance Command contacted one of the Marine companies being deployed into the disputed areas of the Traverse," Anderson continued when Udina fell silent. "They're going to send you a squad, along with the NCOs you'll need to manage the extra personnel. They should arrive within two days, which should give you enough time to requisition any supplies you need."

"Alliance Command has already authorized operational funds for this mission," Udina interjected. "I forwarded you the details on your omnitool."

"Who'll replace me as XO?" Shepard asked as she called up the missive in question, scanning it quickly.

"Command is still debating that," Anderson admitted, "but they'll come to a decision by tonight. Hopefully your XO will arrive before you leave the Citadel. If they don't, other arrangements will be made so that they can rendezvous with the _Normandy_. I've already declared shore leave for the _Normandy'_ s crew before I resigned my command-it might be the last one they get for a while."

"Hopefully we can hunt down Saren quickly," Shepard replied, "but it might be harder to stop whatever he's set in motion with the geth."

"Very true," Anderson conceded, "but I think everyone will sleep a little easier without Saren loose in the galaxy."

After another thirty minutes spent verifying the details of the mission and discussing what little intelligence there was about Saren's movements, Shepard left Udina's office and made her way out of the embassies. Her thoughts were focused inward, but she was too good a soldier to not notice the turian who unfolded himself from where he'd been leaning against the wall.

"Officer Vakarian," she greeted him with some surprise.

"Spectre Shepard," he replied, mandibles set in an expression she hadn't learned yet. Before she could hazard a guess, he blurted, "I'd like to join you. Hunting Saren, I mean."

Shepard blinked at him, for a moment too puzzled to reply. As an officer of the Alliance Navy, she didn't have the requisite authority to invite unsanctioned individuals aboard a prototype ship like the _Normandy._ At least if she wasn't intending to turn them over for interrogation at a detention facility afterwards. She doubted-or rather, knew-that turian ships weren't unalike the Alliance in that regard. As a Spectre, she likely did, but it remained a fact that while her ground team was lacking at the moment and Vakarian was both disciplined and skilled, he also belonged to C-Sec.

Who likely frowned on their officers haring off across space to hunt rogue Spectres.

"Have you discussed this with the Executor?" she asked him to avoid making a direct answer.

He broke eye-contact, which was answer enough. "It doesn't feel right, to leave it like this," he said after the silence had grown awkward. "To just hand him over to you and wish you luck. And it-," he hesitated, searching for words, "it looks bad. To let humans take care of the barefaced traitor, to pretend he isn't our problem just because you've been assigned to take care of it." He glanced up at her then, eyes glacial blue against deepest black.

Shepard frowned at him for another long moment as she weighed the vast quantities of paperwork and command skepticism that even attempting to bring him aboard might cause against the skills he'd displayed during their one day of acquaintanceship. Then she sighed, because while it might be inconvenient to arrange to second him to her ship, she had no doubt that this would not only earn her his gratitude, but also bear tangible benefits in the way of setting a precedent for cooperation between their species and gaining her a grateful contact in C-Sec.

She was too good a soldier for the emotional appeal alone to sway her, especially as she'd his passion translate directly into recklessness already.

"I haven't eaten yet," Shepard told him, realizing abruptly as she did that it was true and that her last meal had been many hours ago. "Recommend a restaurant. I'll rendezvous with you there in about an hour and a half. You get to treat me to dinner regardless of whether you're allowed to come aboard the _Normandy_ ," she told him wryly, "because I can almost guarantee that Udina will not be happy about this. It would be easier if you were a civilian," Shepard continued frankly, "because it will be more difficult to bring you aboard as a member of a foreign military, even if you're acting in the role of a contractor. For now, I'll go speak with Executor Pallin, to see if he'd be willing to grant you an extended leave of absence. I assume you weren't intending to just _leave_ , were you?"

Another sheepish flex of his mandibles. Shepard mastered the urge to pinch the bridge of her nose and resolved to ask Pallin's opinion of bringing Vakarian along before she reached out to any of her contacts. He suggested a restaurant and gave her directions, then they parted ways. The walk to the Executor's office was brief and she found him alone again as the doors hissed open.

He must have seen her eyes sweeping over the empty workstations. "The officers based out of this office are the ones in charge of investigating crime on the Presidium. And most of them are too important to come to us. We go to them instead," he told her. "I received the email. Congratulations, Spectre. Now, what can I do for you?"

"Thank you, Executor. It's about Officer Vakarian."

The executor seemed to settle more resignedly into his chair. "You have some complaint to make?"

"Not at all, sir. Officer Vakarian was essential to the swift resolution of our case against Saren. However, Officer Vakarian has expressed the desire to accompany me on my pursuit of Saren and I'm somewhat at a loss for how to answer him."

Pallin's subharmonics rumbled in a deep sigh. "I'd offer you a chair, but I think they encourage loitering in my office," he said by way of opening. "I can't say I am entirely surprised. When you first came to my office, I told you that Garrus Vakarian was unorthodox. I didn't tell you that he was also young and rash, but if you hadn't figured it out before, you know it now. Do you know the term _adjudas_?"

" _Adjudas_ , to set oneself aside," Shepard responded, though without the rich subvocal context on the turian term. "It's the core principle of turian society. The welfare of Palavan and all turians as a whole are to come before self-advancement, material gain, or even the physical comfort of an individual."

Pallin nodded, his features betraying no surprise at her response. While the term itself hadn't been used until she'd been in N-school, even basic training covered the aspect of turian mentality that had made them almost as difficult to combat as their overwhelming forces.

"It is our greatest strength," Pallin said, almost reaffirming her thoughts. "Humans are the most competitive sapient race to have achieved spaceflight on their own, which makes you powerfully innovative, but also limits you. Turians are by both nature and training more cooperative. If it had been humans fighting them, I doubt the Unification Wars would have ever ended. A human child is encouraged to become a powerful leader, a turian child is taught to find a good leader. We aren't unlike asari in this. Their Maidens flock to a Matriarch when they've spent the wildest years of their youth; turians look to others higher in the meritocracy for the same kind of guidance. For most, it's a need easily met within the bounds of the Hierarchy. Others, like Garrus Vakarian, find their leaders in unexpected places. And when they do, believing they serve some purpose greater than themselves, _adjudas_ makes them quick to offer to set everything else aside to follow them."

Shepard would agree that the diverse nature of the Systems Alliance would never allow it to form as cohesive a body as the Hierarchy and that their expansion efforts had been uneven due to squabbling between the remnants of Earth nations who hadn't quite left their borders and certainly not their cultures behind. But given that she'd come from Mindoir and enjoyed the freedom that came from being tolerant of aberrant opinions, she couldn't think of it as a bad thing even if it meant Parliament couldn't even agree what shade of white was appropriate for the walls of Arcturus Station.

But she shoved that aside as irreconcilable cultural differences between two races who weren't even formed of the same base proteins and considered what he'd suggested about Vakarian. "Do you think it would be wise to bring him along, if the Alliance agrees to give him clearance?"

"So far as C-Sec is concerned, arrangements can be made for the open cases Vakarian had to put aside when the Saren investigation came down. Since the _Normandy_ was a joint project, the matter of nondisclosure agreements should be less of an issue than it might be. You do know, of course, that you have authority as a Spectre to force the decision through."

"Theoretically," Shepard agreed and said no more on the subject.

"As to whether it would be wise to take Vakarian aboard, I will say that any complaints made about him center on his personality rather than his skills. To a turian, unorthodox is not a compliment."

Shepard nodded thoughtfully. If she was honest with herself, she was a little leery of bringing Vakarian aboard for that very reason. Independent action was to be applauded in its place, but not when badly timed heroics endangered a mission. And other than that dangerously badly-staged rescue of the Wards doctor, he hadn't given her any other reason to mistrust him. She would be bringing him in on something other than orders, however, so if he wasn't willing to abide by her rules he could be shipped back to the Citadel.

"In the event Vakarian is cleared, and even if he isn't, the _Normandy_ isn't really equipped for turian comfort. I'd appreciate advice for provisioning as well as adapting human sleeping quarters to a turian. Spectre Kryik hasn't complained yet, but I doubt he'd say anything even if we asked him to sleep in a hammock like a quarian." Every turian bed she'd ever seen had looked like a huge, deeply padded nest, which made providing them private rooms more space efficient than you'd initially think.

She left the Executor's office with a suggestions for adapting human beds for turian bodies and the contact information for the turian who ran C-Sec Academy's cafeteria. When she explained her dilemma, she extracted a promise to forward meal suggestions to her culinary specialist aboard the _Normandy_ and an offer, once she knew how many she'd need to feed, for an order placed through the same supplier they used. She'd first sent a preliminary communication regarding bringing Vakarian in on the hunt for Saren and by the time she'd cut the call, she had an urgent e-mail requesting a secure holocall. She had to backtrack to Udina's office to make it and by the time she'd finished the first round of defending her judgment she was ten minutes late to the restaurant.

She surveyed the interior with interest, curious to see what his choices said about his character as well. When she'd been on the Citadel before, which had been a stint measured in days, she'd taken her most of her meals with fellow officers in human-managed establishments. This was not the furthest thing from that, but it was still very different. It felt a little like she'd walked into the quintessential intergalactic diner. There was the murmur of conversation and it was full of beings of every race, a fact driven home when it was a hanar that offered to seat her and salarians she glimpsed in the kitchen.

The waitresses, of course, were asari.

Shepard had an opportunity to learn what relief looked like on a turian, the nervous young officer's mandibles relaxing from where they'd been held tight to his jaw.

"My apologies for being late," she said as she slid into the booth and tentacles shifted to offer her a menu. She absently thanked the hanar, whose bioluminescence brightened in reply.

"No, it's fine," Vakarian said. "Bureaucracy, right?"

"Right," she said, but while her tone conveyed amusement, his was shadowed by frustration. "I hope you aren't expecting all the rules to suddenly vanish simply because you're working with a Spectre."

"Vanish, no, but streamlining themselves would be nice," he quipped.

They weren't more than fifteen minutes into the meal, which Shepard was finding both enjoyable and enlightening, when Nihlus strode in. He didn't so much ask permission to join them as look expectantly at Vakarian, who nodded. Able tentacles deftly acquired a chair for him and pressed another menu into service-he ended up ordering some equivalent to deep-fried crickets. Or at least that was what they resembled when they were brought to the table. The turian diet wasn't a surprise to her-they didn't have staple grains, the way humans did, instead basing their diet on meat, tree nuts, insects, and fruit for a protein heavy diet-but it was the first time she'd been asked to sit at a table with someone eating crunchy bugs.

Survival training meant she'd done it herself, but that only made her even queasier, so she did her best not to watch.

"The quarian wants in and the krogan won't leave," he said brusquely and without preamble.

"The quarian?" Shepard asked.

"Says she's an engineer, so she can make herself useful."

Shepard stared at him incredulously, despite giving her a better view than she'd wanted of his eating habits. "A quarian engineer? Short of a batarian engineer, there's no one _less_ likely to be allowed aboard the _Normandy._ "

"It's your ship," Nihlus replied. "And use of it was promised in Council Chambers. They'll find that hard to take back, even if they don't like your decisions."

"Let's not burn my bridges before I know if I have to cross the river again," Shepard told him, giving in to the desire to pinch the bridge of her nose. "Do you want her brought aboard?"

"Our knowledge of the geth is limited," Nihlus pointed out. "This is the closest we'll be able to come to locating an expert without contacting the fleet itself."

"Do you think she'd cooperate?" Shepard asked doubtfully.

"Why wouldn't she?" Vakarian questioned. "We'll be taking care of their problem before it becomes a war with the geth."

The turians had never had a Sun Tzu, their military strength built on the backs of their soldiers, the superiority of their fleet, and their Machiavellian treatment of their enemies. "You don't think that they wouldn't see this as their best opportunity for reclaiming Rannoch? If this escalates into a war, we'll incur all the casualties and expenses while weakening the geth forces enough that the quarians can take the opportunity to cross the Veil and reclaim their homeworld."

Both of the turians regarded her without blinking for a long moment. "Human tactics," Vakarian muttered.

"Why fight a war you can manipulate someone into fighting for you?" Shepard pressed. "What the Fleet can't make itself, it can salvage, and their entire population is mobile."

"I think she'll be useful," Nihlus countered. "She's young, angry, and unlikely to be as ruthless as you are."

Poor Vakarian did his best to be an invisible turian as Shepard and Nihlus held an intense, quiet argument, both of them aware of the possibility of gaining an audience. Nihlus's subharmonics became a violent rumble while Shepard became bitingly polite as she leashed her temper. In the end, Shepard agreed to _attempt_ to gain clearance for the quarian in the understanding that she would not only sign the nondisclosure agreements, but also be brought aboard in the understanding it was as a geth expert. She wouldn't be allowed in the drive core or any of the more sensitive areas of the ship, but the incoming XO would find her a noncritical support position once they had a better idea of her skills.

They came to no agreement about the krogan, but when Shepard sent off her next batch of e-mails, she included Wrex in her request. It came as no surprise to her that his contact came through within hours-the Alliance wasn't above using unaffiliated talent especially when it came so cheaply-but by the time she'd fallen into bed Udina had become involved and there was a vicious debate ongoing about whether a joint operation between races would win humans more galactic support or if it would undermine the success of her mission by laying the credit at the turians' feet.


	9. Sentinel Against Disaster (Part II)

A/N: Apologies for the delay. I might have seriously underestimated this story. However, my military-beta is still being very patient, so a round of applause to Ghostdragon31, who worked with me to quasi-realistically staff the _Normandy_.

Absolute Magnitude

-Chapter Nine-

Sentinel Against Disaster (Part II)

Shepard started awake at the insistent chirp of her omnitool-an incoming call, not her alarm. She had a soldier's keen awareness of just how little sleep she'd gotten; her internal clock insisted that it was something just a little better than o-dark-thirty. Her brief glimpse of the display as she keyed up the holoface confirmed it.

"Good morning, sir," she said as the audio link connected, her tone far crisper than she actually felt. Scrubbing her hand through her hair, she waited for the inevitable-and Ambassador Udina was not long in delivering.

"Commander Shepard. Perhaps you'd like to explain why I'm currently looking at pictures of you eating dinner with a pair of turians."

Shepard silently counted to three and reminded herself that she'd expected this, that the programs designed to sweep through the extranet and make her a ghost wouldn't be active for almost a week, then had to count to three again as some part of her sharply reminded her that she'd also expected Udina to wait until a reasonable hour to confront her about it. She wondered who'd called the ambassador about the photos, because there was no other reasonable explanation for him to even be awake at this hour. Unless he was using stims, which might explain why he sounded even more acerbic than usual. "I was off-duty, sir."

"Don't pretend to be obtuse, Shepard. You're entirely too politically canny to have overlooked the fact that the eyes of this station are going to be watching you like a flock of half-starved vultures. The Butcher of Torfan isn't an anonymous soldier. Neither is the first human Spectre. The minute you sat down at that table, speculation ran rampant on the extranet."

"Sir, scuttlebutt was unavoidable," Shepard said as she swung her legs off the bed, glad that she'd taken over the captain's quarters. Dr. Chakwas was a very light sleeper and she'd regret inflicting Udina on anyone this early. "I see no reason to discourage the idea that human-turian relations have improved to the point where we can collaborate on critical mission." Of course, to some, it would be sitting down to dinner with the enemy that concerned them and collaboration on a more personal level, but she intended to ignore that avenue of possibility. Which would hopefully induce Udina to do the same.

"A mission critical to the safety of _human_ -inhabited space," Udina corrected irritably. "Which is why it should remain in human hands. This is not the time to allow your xenosympathies to get the better of you."

Shepard, safely unseen, rubbed her temples as she paced the limited floorspace of her cabin. "Sir, while I respect our isolationist policies-I don't want the Hierarchy patrolling our space or stricter Council oversight any more than you do-I think that it _because_ this is a critical mission that we cannot undervalue the opportunity it presents."

"And what opportunity would that be?" Udina asked sardonically.

"A highly publicized collaboration, regardless of whether they decide that it was turian skill that triumphed over human incompetence, will sway opinion irrespective of actual policy changes. The volus are a client-state of the turians and they've limited trade with us because of the hostility between our races-the same is true for the asari. They're both cooperative, consensus-governed cultures who place a premium on the ability to compromise. And the turians themselves will be aware that this mission-high-risk, high-profile-was assigned to me. We can't avoid bringing Spectre Kryik aboard, but if we accept his presence gracefully rather than attempting to fight it, it will reflect more favorably on us. And if command chooses to allow Vakarian aboard, well, I think we will find future collaborations easier if we indicate a willingness to trust."

We can purchase a great deal of goodwill from our alien allies with minimal risk. I am a respecter of xenocultures, not a sympathizer. I won't let them control the mission, but I won't endanger what mutual respect we've managed to accrue with my own prejudices." Shepard paused just long enough to judge the quality of the silence and quit while it was still thoughtful.

She felt the first prospect of victory when Udina sighed, a sound edged in the irritation of the out-maneuvered. "Very well, Shepard. I will support you in your decision, but I cannot guarantee that even with my interference you'll find yourself leaving port with two turians aboard. With a time-sensitive mission like this, they don't have to say no, just stall long enough to make the decision irrelevant. Do you still stand by the decision to bring the quarian in?"

 _No_ was the easy answer, but her plan to prevent any attempt to undermine her command of the mission depended on Nihlus feeling as if he had some measure of control. So she said instead, "Yes."

The call dragged on for another fifteen minutes as Udina felt the need to reiterate things she already knew and things she'd have known if she'd been given time to check her email. Such as the meeting with her new XO, which was scheduled to occur at 0900. She took the time to read through the forwarded profile when she'd decided regretfully against going back to bed. His name was Amadeus Redcloud, which was odd enough that she followed the link to the brief profiles on his parents. His mother was a name she recognized-classical pianist, which answered the question of his given name, while his father was extremely highly placed on the Colonial Authority.

Flicking back through the screens to Redcloud's personal data, she followed the promising course of his career as a Marine Raider until it came to an abrupt halt after an IED encounter which would have killed a less resilient man. He'd survived and been rehabilitated on the Citadel. Two hundred years ago, that would have been the end of it, but with a combination of human and salarian medical ingenuity, he'd regained full functionality. They'd inserted wafer-thin regulator disks between his vertebrae and replaced the spinal fluid with ninates suspended in a medium that was capable of mimicking the electrical signal coming from the brain and passing it through the dead gap to the still-functional system beyond and rebuilt his right arm from the shoulder down with state-of-the art robotics. In terms of day-to-day living, there was nothing he couldn't do now that he'd done before.

But there was a danger to all this technology-it was just as vulnerable to omnitool interference as shield and weapons systems. If the tiny nanocomputers that regulated the system failed, it wasn't something that could be corrected in the field. The Corps had offered him a medical discharge with full retirement, but he'd briefly taken a teaching position instead. It hadn't lasted long, less than six months, before he'd decided to try for his commission. And a branch change, while he was at it. He'd earned it in short order and spent the next several years in command positions on Navy ships. Unlike Shepard _,_ he actually had experience in managing the crews of starships, which was a different beast from her usual sort of command. Normally, a rank like Commander would imply just that, but not so for the graduates of N-school.

Reassured that the more 'domestic' side of the mission would be in good hands, she went through her morning grooming routine and broke her fast in the wardroom, then left the ship in civvies. She gauged that she had enough time to run a personal errand before she had to greet Lt. Commander Redcloud, especially if she took a transit taxi to her destination. She'd only been to the shop in-person once, but she did enough business over the extranet that the salarian manning the counter brightened in recognition as the door hissed shut behind her.

"Shepard," Antola greeted her. "Very glad to see you on the Citadel again. What can I help you find today?"

"Something on the social customs of turians, please."

"Oh? That's a bit different," the salarian commented as his long, agile fingers manipulated the holoface of the station in front of him. "Going to be spending time among turians? Or simply bored of your usual topics?"

"I'm surprised you haven't heard."

The flat, lipless mouth tugged upward at the corners. "I have. I was just being polite. I'm certain that everyone else is doing quite enough of being in your business without me doing it as well. Ah, there they are."

Anyone could sell books-and did, especially the digital form-but only Antola was just as good at recommending books as he was at selling them. If he sold it, he'd read it, and he sold a great many books. Of course, if she only slept for an hour a day and had a salarian's ability to process visual information-at least half again as fast as a human, due to metabolism differences and different cellular construction of the eye leading to a different CFF sensitivity-she'd find getting through books much quicker as well.

"I have two recommendations for you, both quite long. Though the first is actually an abridgement meant for the lay public of a fifteen volume series, so it might be quite short, if you look at it that way. An asari adapted it from Eton Gorrus's _A Study of the Kinship and Social Systems of Spaceflight Capable Races_ , removing most of the hard data and the academic language. Her version is titled _A Place to Belong: Social and Kinship Ties_ , which might give you some idea of the tone shift. It doesn't focus on turians exclusively, but the second one does. _Beneath the Banner,_ by Gael Principium. Digital copies, yes?"

"Please," Shepard replied. Business concluded, she chatted with the salarian until another customer claimed his attention. She checked her omnitool as she slipped out the door and was surprised to find a brief note from Udina. Vakarian had been cleared, but they were still debating on whether the quarian would be allowed aboard. She contacted her requisitions officer, cutting his leave short in order to convert a stateroom set up for a single human occupant into one suitable for housing two turians. She explained the modifications the executor had recommended, then sent an e-mail instructing that the terminal in the stateroom be modified so that the holoface conformed to turian ergonomics. Another call saw suitable foodstuffs being prepared for delivery; she alerted the head of her Mess Specialist team once she'd gotten an approximate time, and then she had no more time for errands.

It was back to the _Normandy_ and into a uniform in time to receive her new XO, who was already waiting for her in the wardroom by the time she'd gotten all her creases in order. Shepard had a few moments to study him before their hands met in a briskly professional handshake. "Commander Shepard," he said. "Glad to be aboard, ma'am."

"And we're glad to have your expertise, Lt. Commander," she responded.

His files had included a shoulders-up photograph, but now she catalogued details that hadn't been noticeable in it. Warm, copper-colored skin was paired with dark eyes, which she'd expected, but she hadn't realized he wore his black hair long. Less than ten years ago the grooming regulations had been modified to reflect a more gender-irrelevant Alliance, which allowed women to wear the classic high-and-tight when before they'd been subject to minimum length requirements and also allowed men to wear their hair long, though it still had to kept away from the collar.

If she was slightly surprised to see him with his hair twisted up into a neat bun, it wasn't that he wore it badly-quite the opposite-it was that for all the forward-thinking regulations the Alliance military itself was conservative in spirit. Very few women optioned to have their heads shaved when they went into basic and very few men decided to go against long-standing traditions. Shepard silently approved his choice-the genetic lottery had gone in his favor and years of military discipline had only honed the edges of what was already tall, dark, and handsome.

She might not be interested in violating regs-either religious or military-but she couldn't say she didn't appreciate the view.

Shepard gave him a very similar tour to the one she'd given Nihlus only days ago, though the conversation varied considerably. Besides the unexpected bonus of being just as decorative as Kaidan, Redcloud came just as advertised: organized, highly intelligent, and intuitive. That he also had a sense of humor was even more appreciated than his looks-living in barracks with irritable people was difficult enough. The confines of a ship amplified everything. "You might as well call me Maddie," he said as he ably took command of what had recently been her office. "A DI in basic thought it was funny and I never managed to escape it."

"Shepard," she offered. "I don't use my first name, even in private. I take it that naval officers are more relaxed about this as a rule, then. I was a little confused, the first time Lt. Commander Alenko insisted."

Redcloud chuckled. "Speaking as someone who's served in both branches, the short answer to that is yes. We still put on a good show in the wardroom and in uniform when we're in public, but as your social pool is a lot more limited on a ship than it is planetside, hobnobbing with other ranking officers is the best we can do. So as long as good order is maintained and chain of command is respected, no one makes a fuss. Of course, if you're uncomfortable with it..."

"No. It's fine," Shepard replied and that was the end of it as he immersed himself in personnel files and schedules.

Shepard left him to it, checking in on the mess to discover a faintly ill-looking mess specialist being shown how to quality-check freeze-dried insects by the head of the team. Some twenty pounds in total of several different species would be taking up space in the dry goods section that the team had cleared and sanitized for the dextro supplies.

It wasn't as if humans didn't eat insects-they were a ready source of protein and could be farmed in just the same way as any other animal intended for human consumption, without nearly the resources required for creatures like cattle or sheep-but unlike with turians, it wasn't a universal practice. On crowded, ultra-urban planets, it was often the only kind of commercially viable farming that took place.

Shepard hadn't come from that sort of environment, and from the look on his face, neither had the slightly green-looking young man. The slow process of domesticating native species-after the first garden planet fiasco the Colonial Authority had been established so that they didn't inadvertently destroy one of the rare, valuable biospheres-had gone well on Mindoir, which had been in the megafauna stage of development. So she still categorized eating things with too many legs as a survival measure, not a normal part of one's diet.

With everything being delivered on time and no last minute crises to solve, at least none deserving of her direct attention, Shepard returned to her cabin and slipped back into the civvies she'd laid aside earlier. She greeted the first trickle of returning personnel as they checked in from their leave, including Williams, who had loss some of the stress lines around her eyes. It was hours yet before her Marines were due to arrive, which gave her plenty of time for a less personal but still profitable errand. Favors bought and sold-there was a reason information brokers were some of the wealthiest citizens space had to offer.

Her omnitool chirped again and Shepard didn't bother to stifle the ragged sigh that escaped her lips. Her mood improved slightly when she saw that it wasn't Udina or a representative of the Alliance. Her patience had worn rather thin with the last three e-mails regarding security protocols, even if she hadn't read them yet. Even if they were practicing selective amnesia about the Hierarchy having co-designed the _Normandy,_ this was getting tedious. They'd had one very brief war decades ago-at some point they were going to have to get to the point of détente in more than official policy.

"Shepard?" Vakarian's voice reverberated in her ear.

"What can I do for you, Officer Vakarian?" Shepard asked. "Was there something wrong with your NDA?"

"Oh, no, just-I just wanted to thank you." There were heavy subharmonics again and Shepard was again cuttingly aware that their translators were only a crutch, not a perfect solution. At least most of the conversation with a turian was vocal-humans were woefully underequipped to deal with any species who actually made use of their equivalent to the vomeronasal organ.

"No thanks necessary," Shepard replied. "I believe that you'll make a valuable member of the team. That's worth a little headache." She just hoped it was worth the rather large headache that it had actually brought, but whining to your subordinates wasn't just unprofessional, it was annoying.

"I'll be certain to live up to your expectations, then," Vakarian said. Then came a strange little vocalization, before he said, "They didn't tell me when they wanted me to report."

"Ah," Shepard said, suddenly understanding why he hadn't waited to give his thanks in person. "You have about six Earth standard hours before we're ready to leave port, but you can report to the _Normandy_ whenever you're ready. My XO is expecting you-he'll brief you as to your duties aboard ship and show you to your stateroom."

"Stateroom? But..."

"We're boarding you with Spectre Kryik," Shepard explained as she reached the transit taxi hub and keyed in her destination. She didn't think she'd have to explain beyond that and the rumble of understanding from Vakarian confirmed it. "I'll be giving a welcome speech in the mess once everyone's aboard and fed-you can tell me how badly my Mess Specialists fared against turian recipes."

Vakarian was still chuckling when she cut the connection.

She hadn't been certain what she'd find at her destination, but she was unsurprised to discover that Fist's establishment was carrying on without him. _Chora's Den_ still pulsed with synth-music that Shepard would never understand the appeal of, fresh barkeepers replacing the ones who'd died in their assault on Fist. Women this time, in clinging asari-style dresses.

But neither the dancers nor the drinks were the object of coming back to this place-she was actually shocked to find her target as easily as she did. She'd asked the Consort about his colony of origin and a quick extranet search had turned up his appearance and plate color, but it was his otherwise empty table and complete disinterest in the dancers that drew her attention first.

She drifted past the bar, baffling a bartender with a request for fruit juice, and then she seated herself at General Septimus Oraka's table, taking one of the chairs that left her back to the wall.

Shepard wasn't stupid: for all that business continued as usual, they had been killing people here very recently. She wouldn't count on the gratitude of whichever of Fist's lieutenants had succeeded him. She could, however, count on the unsavory elements to keep people from taking photos. Or at least most people-the ones who didn't realize taking snips and stills made them looking like informants might still risk it.

The decorated general was drunk enough that he only peered blearily at her for a long moment before indignation sparked in predator golden eyes. "Something you need, human?" he rumbled. His plates were a dull steel-grey, his colonial markings almost like white petals sweeping back along the ridges of his brow and along his crest and mandibles, leaving his cheeks and nasal ridge bare. Two swift strokes, almost like fangs, marked his lower jaw. Not so pretty as Nihlus's or the executor's, but far more elaborate than Vakarian's-Palavan's markings were a study in brutal simplicity, while their colonies wore far more elaborate marks.

Shepard eyed him a long moment, then, "I'm here on behalf of the Consort."

"Sha'ira sent you? And here I didn't think she cared," he sneered, mandibles flaring aggressively.

"The spread of the secrets of top-ranking diplomats might be concerning to someone in her position, you understand," Shepard replied evenly.

Which made Oraka scoff and slump back into his seat. "It would figure that would be the _only_ reason she'd care."

Shepard frowned at him. "She gave me the understanding that you desired more from her than her professional services," she prodded gently. "I find it...unusual that a turian general would be reduced to _this,"_ she couldn't help the disapproving tone that pervaded her words, "by a single asari."

"Why do you find it so unusual?" the general challenged. "Because we're heartless monsters?"

"Because you're a pragmatic species who don't seem inclined to confuse professional courtesy with deep sentiment," she replied, tone slightly caustic. "You'll have to explain it to me."

That seemed to take him aback for a moment, but his recovery was quick. "Explain it. You want a lecture on turian romance?"

"Well, we are in a bar," Shepard demurred. "I don't know about turians, but I suspect a significant percentage of the humans are here to talk about romance. Or at least sex."

That earned her a rough laugh as Oraka threw back the rest of his drink. "Oh, yes. I've noticed. In the time I've been here, I've seen humans proposition everything that walks in, regardless of species or even gender. I've even had a human man ask if I wanted company."

"And that's strange?" Shepard asked curiously. Her own views on human sexuality were pervaded with religious bias, but she'd never stopped to think what other species might think of it. Asari would doubtless embrace it's flexibility, salarians would care only as it effected work efficiency, but turians? That was harder to judge.

"Yes." He shifted in what looked like discomfort, calling for another drink. "Spirits," he grumbled. "It's almost like you humans never outgrow relationships based on physical attraction. And you can manage to find _anything_ attractive. Shipboard antics, for all your life. It's no wonder you can't stay mated."

Shepard waited silently as he drained half his glass in one go.

"There is a _reason_ that I'm like this," he hissed at her. "If it was just sex, I could walk away. I've seen pretty asari before and will again. Beautiful turian females. But those are casual things. For a deep, lifelong matebond, it requires trust. And that is very hard to find for a general. I could tell Sha'ira anything. Anything," he emphasized.

"That's the way human relationships work as well," Shepard pointed out.

Oraka eyed her, those yellow eyes gleaming in the muted light. "I feel you need a turian biology lesson," he said. "Unlike you, we can consciously interpret pheromones."

Shepard nodded. "I knew that much. I'm afraid that my knowledge of turian sexuality is limited to its opinion on consent. _The body is a beast, it knows only want; the mind is the master, it must be obeyed._ "

"Primarch Altus," Oraka confirmed approvingly. "Well, that is probably more than most humans manage. Although your race could work at putting it into practice. I've seen behavior here..." he shook his head. "Turian males don't pursue," he said, visually resigning himself to this conversation. "Males display, like your females. It's females who pursue. And it's their arousal-the pheromones their glands produce-that makes the...mechanical aspect of male arousal possible."

Another long drink from his glass was required, though it didn't wipe the look of distaste from his face. "So we don't have sexual 'preferences' the same way you do," he explained. His tone carried no judgment, just a plain statement of fact. "And rape requires enough drug intervention to make it incredibly rare. Synthetic pheromones for the male, muscle relaxants for the female." That one was loaded with enough judgment that Shepard winced.

"I've seen several turian-asari couples on the Citadel," she observed, redirecting the conversation away from humanity's faults. "The asari can produce the same pheromones as a turian female?"

Oraka chuckled. "The asari have the most complex system of pheromone glands of any sapient species," he said. "You'd have to ask a salarian or an asari herself if you want more specific details than that." His mandibles shifted. "Humans, too. Though I don't know if you'd be capable of matebonding, you're recognizably female enough for a male turian."

"That's...actually very odd."

"It is," Oraka acknowledged. "Considering we're basically poisonous to one another. But there it is. Sex for a turian. Matebonding, however, is different. It is the deep, mutual trust between a female and up to two males. When that occurs, our glands-male and female-begin to secrete a very specific compound. It changes the chemical make-up of our body. You can smell when someone is matebound, just as a male will only be aroused by the scent of his mate from that point forward."

"But a female takes up to two males?" Shepard pressed curiously.

"Our numbers have always been skewed toward males. 1.78 male births to every female. In antiquity, only households headed by very aggressive males didn't include a second male. Today, we have the asari, but it is still common in Hierarchy space to see such households."

Shepard's silence was thoughtful as she tried to integrate this fresh knowledge with the records of turian history that she knew. It fit neatly enough, because they'd hardly ever mentioned family, personal merit being more important than any fact of birth despite some families making their name in certain professions. Then she shook herself. "I think I've led you far off-topic," she apologized. "So, you thought that you could trust Sha'ira deeply enough to form a matebond? And that's why you're trying to drink yourself into a stupor?"

"Now you understand," Oraka replied. "So leave me be."

"I understand that you're suffering from severe disappointment," Shepard said carefully. "But you're a _general_. A _turian_ general. If you couldn't cope with set-backs, that's not a promotion you would have one. Yes, you invested considerable resources in this campaign. But the heart isn't a finite resource. You've had your retreat. Regroup, rethink, and stop shaming yourself and your command by committing petty acts of revenge."

"Just like that?" Oraka scowled.

"Well, no, I doubt it will be 'just like that', but you're better than this place," Shepard said earnestly, her eyes flitting over the interior of the bar with unconcealed disdain. "Better than drinking yourself to the point of drunken ramblings in front of a stranger."

"Better than to make trouble with elcor diplomats?"

"That too."

A rumbling sigh heralded capitulation. "I'm still finishing _this_ drink," he told her, tapping one finger on the rim of his glass. "And since I assume I'll eventually be grateful for this, I'll buy you one as well. What are you drinking?" When she told him, she earned herself an incredulous look. She ended up with something called a Starfall and it was her turn to look dubious-not only was it almost a midnight blue, there were luminescent particles suspended in the liquid. _Bio_ luminescent, she discovered to her unease a moment later, when she'd taken a cautious sip and discovered why the waitress was lingering. Easily digested, excellent source of vitamins, completely compatible with amino-based life forms.

"You never bothered to introduce yourself," Oraka pointed out as Shepard took another cautious sip.

She glanced up at him, inspecting him for signs of sarcasm. But no, she'd finally discovered someone on this station who didn't recognize her on sight. "Commander Shepard. Pleasure to meet you, General."

And that should have been the end of it until the flight carrying her squad arrived, but she hadn't even finished her drink before trouble reared its head again. This time it came in the form of a red-headed woman who had low, ferocious argument with one of the bartenders and then left. Unremarkable in itself, but a turian who'd been making himself very amiable with one of the dancers followed her out. Shepard sighed and excused herself from the table, though she was surprised by Oraka's promise to sort things out with both the elcor ambassador and the Consort.

What came next was a very odd interlude. The girl, whose name was Rita, had been attempting to convince her sister that acting as a C-Sec informant was a dangerous profession. The turian who'd followed her out turned out to be the sister's handler, one Detective Chellick, who was anxious not to have his investigation ruined at the eleventh hour. For the last several months, Jenna, Rita's sister, had been watching, listening, and ingratiating herself into the network that was based out of the nightclub. And now, at last, Chellick was about to get exactly what he needed-when Jenna came off-shift this evening, she would be making her way to the Lower Markets, posing as a buyer for illegal gun mods.

Rita wanted Jenna out and Shepard's help in achieving that. What she got instead was Shepard pointing out that the success of many complicated C-Sec investigations hinged on civilian informants. But she did, eventually, agree to accompany Jenna. Who seemed subtly relieved when Shepard arrived in borrowed armor and makeup, though her weapons were her own. It certainly made more sense that a mercenary would use Jenna as an intermediary rather than Jenna herself being interested in the mods; as Shepard asked knowledgeable questions about a really nasty box of incendiary rounds she could see that the krogan peddling them thought so as well. The mods were handed over to Chellick, Jenna was at significantly less risk for the moment, and Shepard was beginning to begrudge the number of times she'd had to change clothes in the course of an Earth standard day.

Luckily, nothing unfortunate occurred on the way back to the _Normandy_ and she was back in uniform in time to greet her new arrivals. Udina had said that the ship was originally intended to house a recon squad and that it was off the table, but he'd apparently only meant SOCOM and somewhere along the line her one squad had multiplied to a squad with support personnel. Not that she minded, as the policy switch from deniable ops to use of aggressive force worked better when you had enough bodies for the task at hand, but though the _Normandy_ was technically a frigate, they were going to be berthed to capacity. And judging by the vehicles coming aboard, they'd have _just_ enough room in the hangar.

As a second Mako rolled into her hangar to join the one that had occupied it since she'd come aboard the _Normandy_ , she shook hands with the staff sergeant. A handsome woman in her early thirties, she had skin the rich, lustrous color of coffee beans, her hair neatly braided and the ends of the braids twisted into an equally neat bun. "Good evening, commander. Staff Sergeant Joan Goddard, 66th LAR reporting, ma'am." Though the Alliance military was vast, Shepard instantly recognized the battalion. They might not have sent her Raiders, but they'd given her the Devil's Own.

Shepard returned the greeting. "So, what have you brought me, staff sergeant? I wasn't expecting quite this many."

"We got a last minute green light for personnel and supplies-we brought on extra provisions as well," the staff sergeant reassured her. "You've got ten scouts, six crewmen for the Mako-three for the one we brought and three for the one you had, four mechanics, three comm specialists, two supply, two MARS all-terrain vehicles, and one M35 Mako to supplement the one you already have. I'm assigned as a VC-I assumed you'd have a SNCO aboard already, since we didn't have one accompany us."

Ashley Williams was a Gunnery Chief, which was a specialist position roughly equivalent to a sergeant. If it had been Anderson who'd been leaning on the Board, he might have assumed she'd want someone with at least a passing familiarity with the geth in a command position. She'd have to alert Williams to her changed duties once they'd brought all these vehicles aboard.

While she was speaking, a young man with hair so pale as to be almost translucent walked up, waiting to join the conversation. "Lieutenant Bram, ma'am. We'll be bringing aboard two S-14 Lammergeier dropships capable of putting your scouts and vehicles planetside. I have five crewmen accompanying me; I'll be your flight lead."

Somehow they managed to tuck it all neatly into her hanger, although space was at a premium by the time they were finished.

She returned to the command deck, positioning herself at Joker's shoulder rather than at the CIC platform. The pilot chatted happily with her-proving that rule about naval officers-until Williams messaged and informed Shepard that all supplies were aboard and the hatches sealed. That was it then-Redcloud had reported the arrival of their turian, krogan, and, surprisingly enough, quarian shipmates while she'd been out aiding a C-Sec investigation.

She had an immediate objective, even if tracing the money exchanged on the Fist debacle was proving slower going than she'd hoped-the audio files Tali'Zaroh nar Rayya had provided as evidence against the turian Spectre had featured him discussing something referred to as the Conduit with an asari matriarch named Benezia. Given that the information about it had come from a Prothean beacon, it was assumed to be a Prothean artifact. And intel had confirmed the suggestion that it was Matriarch Benezia's own daughter who was one of the leading authorities in the field. Last seen on an archeological dig on the planet Therum, Knossos system, Artemis Tau cluster. Given both her academic knowledge and the value of her insight into her mother's actions, their first objective was to secure the scientist.

"So," Joker drawled, "we're about to set out to bring down the most ruthless Spectre in charted space. My pre-flight checklist's done and everything's good to go here, so right about now would be the time for a rousing speech. You know, if you do that sort of thing," he said as Shepard eyed him.

Shepard sighed and overrode the comms. "This is Commander Shepard speaking," she said. "To our crew just joining us this evening, welcome aboard the _Normandy._ She's the most advanced stealth frigate in the entire Alliance fleet. But you aren't here to admire her-you're here today because somewhere out in those distant stars is a turian who wants to bring a war to our doorstep. A war, ladies and gentlemen, fought not by creatures of flesh and blood, but by a tireless synthetic race. One which had already evicted an entire population from their planet."

The geth represent every nightmare of AI technology gone amuck. Self-replicating, they need neither food nor rest. I don't need to tell you the kind of catastrophe that would result if they were to emerge from behind the Veil in force. But Saren isn't satisfied with these allies, no matter how formidable. The geth are only tools, acting under the Spectre's orders in order to revive a machine race capable of destruction of a far greater magnitude. He calls them 'Reapers' and they are true to their name. They are an ancient race of machines who were responsible for the destruction of the Protheans. The same Protheans who built the Citadel on which we are now docked and who built the mass relay system-evidence that their technology was far superior to our own. But they lost their war," she said softly.

"The Protheans are a dead race now. But _humanity_ is not. Saren still hasn't found the key to replicating the destruction of fifty thousand years ago. And he will not. Because one Spectre, no matter his reputation, is only one being. He is the fulcrum on which this whole plot rests-we topple him and the rest will come crashing down.

"So we will do this not just for humanity, but for every Council race. And for our place in that Council. Since we first ventured outside our solar system, humanity has stood apart, but now is the time to show ourselves capable and productive members of this galaxy, worthy of the trust that has been invested in us."

Even though no one could see her, a cold, tight smile crept across her lips. " _Per ardua ad astra_ -through adversity to the stars and through any obstacle to our target. We will hunt him swiftly, efficiently, and without mercy. That is all."


	10. Tear Down the Towers (Part I)

A/N: Reviews are the fuel that power this starship. Also, though I do have a long-suffering military advisor (who will not let me call the Mako a tank-we considered AFV and LAV and settled on IFV, though technically it qualifies for all of them), let me know when enough becomes too much.

Absolute Magnitude

-Chapter Ten-

Tear Down the Towers (Part I)

The residents of Earth a hundred years ago-or at least those in a position to appreciate the interior of a dropship-would likely be surprised at how little the technology had changed in what seemed a vast interval in what had been an aggressively evolving field.

But no more.

Just as nuclear weapons had once been regulated and sanctioned by the power of the United Nations, humanity had discovered to its surprise that it wasn't due to luck or God or some strange manifest destiny that had seen near technological parity with the turians during the Relay 314 incident. All credit for what might elsewise had been a crushing defeat-Palavan had been in the stars when Nebuchadnezzar II had been building the hanging gardens of Babylon and sacking the city of Jerusalem-belonged to the strange document the asari called the Matriarch's Accord.

The asari had been wanderers by nature long before they'd left the skies of their homeworld for the vast stretches of the galaxy. Humanity's first written laws had codified vengeance with the stele of Hammurabi; the asari had engraved instead a series of teachings about reciprocal hospitality so deep-rooted they were almost more religion than anything else. When they'd left Thessia, those laws had followed them and while their evolved form might not at first glance appear related, they served the same purpose-the Matriarch's Accord protected asari wayfarers by defining the limits of technology acceptable for use in warfare.

It kept the salarians from developing biological weapons of nightmare capabilities and the turians from building more of their übermensch-class ships (the designation given by the Systems Alliance when they'd encountered a ship that had been preserved as a museum rather than permanently dry-docked or recycled; the turian term could be translated as "world devourer" though they'd only ever been used in ship-to-ship combat).

And humans, understanding that they couldn't withstand the combined might of the Council races, had grudgingly transitioned their weapons development programs into theoretical exercises.

While the foresight of the asari matriarchs had limited the destruction done in inter- and intraplanetary squabbles-which Shepard regarded as a good thing-she understood that some people resented being forced to use what was essentially the technology of their ancestors with a holoface upgrade and modern design aesthetics. It was almost a traditional grumble in the armed forces, like the taunting between branches.

Years of familiarity and refinement had their advantages, however, in that everyone knew exactly what their equipment was capable of.

"We did a scan when we passed over the area of Therum where Dr. T'Soni's dig site was registered with her university," Lt. Bram reported to her as they faced a topographic layout of Therum projecting itself up from the table in the mission readiness room. Red blips obligingly appeared as he spoke, marking out their enemies. "The _Normandy_ picked up geth readings and from the size, they're not footsoldiers. We've designated them colossuses-"

"Colossi," Shepard murmured.

"Yes, ma'am," Bram said. "We've designated them colossi and while we'd probably be able to take them out with the S-14s provided they don't turn out to be ground-to-air specialists, initial readings indicate that they're emitting a jamming frequency-we might have to target them manually. Normally that wouldn't be a problem because this mining site suspended operations for the duration of the dig, but we couldn't make contact with Dr. T'Soni, though we got some strange readings from something other than the geth. When we pulled the topo studies from the university's archives, they shoved significant subterranean excavation."

Mapped tunnels and underground rooms defined themselves in lighter blue beneath the darker blue surface. "While by all reports they're in pretty impressive shape considering their age, they are fifty thousand years old and this area of Therum has become considerably more seismically active in the last three hundred years. There's a chance that stray missile fire might destabilize the mining operation above and if the surface buildings collapse, depending on how well shored-up those tunnels are, they might go too. And since we were unable to establish contact with Dr. T'Soni..."

"We can't know where she's sheltering in them and it would be just our luck to bring it down on her head," Nihlus finished his thought with a disgruntled rumble. "It's unusual that she'd travel alone, though. I don't know much about archeology, but Prothean ruins usually attract more than a lone asari."

It was Kaidan who answered. "Apparently, there was trouble with their grant-the rest of the team was waiting to travel, but Dr. T'Soni went ahead to do some non-invasive study on her own."

"Did the university have a geological survey of the area?" Shepard asked Bram.

"The university didn't, but the mining company did." He obligingly overlaid another map, the bluescale shifting to reflect the relative hardness of surrounding rock deposits. "Only near the dig site though," he warned, "the company apparently shared our concerns about destabilization."

Shepard frowned thoughtfully at the map. "What about secondary entrances?"

"None, ma'am. Because they were working suited, the ventilation isn't big enough to shove a salarian down, let alone a human or asari. The mining company stopped excavation when they encountered the ruins, so the only official entry is the one we're aware of. And part of the reason the university was excited is that the preliminary survey showed minimal looting, so we don't have any scavenger tunnels on record."

Shepard studied the holomap for a moment longer before dragged her finger across the screen embedded in table at the commander's seat. Her movement was echoed on the larger holoface, a flat area on the map sheltered by a small ridge flushing green. "Then we'll have the S-14s drop the ground team here. Judging by the elevation readings, this ridge should provide enough shelter to land the Lammergeiers. How long to get them back off the ground?"

"We can be airborne in seconds," Bram promised. "The S-14s have excellent vertical thrust."

"Good. Once you've dropped us, give us enough time round this rock formation and then get back up in the air. I'll need you to run interference. Draw fire from us until we've taken down the colossi. Keep as close as you can for a quick extraction, but don't tempt fate if their dropships make an appearance."

"We'll play it careful," Bram agreed. "Nothing like an enemy who doesn't play by the rules to have a nasty surprise waiting."

They spent another ten minutes discussing ground tactics-which involved a discussion of the surface lava flows and the associated breathing hazards, which meant full masks-until Shepard was satisfied.

"Well, we have an asari to find and extract. Let's not keep her waiting any longer," Nihlus said, shoving himself away from the workstation where he'd been ensconced.

Training made the deployment run as smoothly as a clock mechanism and it seemed like hardly any time at all passed between laying the foundation and the S-14s smoothly setting down behind her chosen ridgeline, the external audio feeds picking up the impact of missiles against the rocky fortification Shepard had chosen to put them down behind. It seemed the colossi had ground-to-air capabilities after all, but their own jamming suite had thwarted the autotargeting capabilities of the enemy.

She was seated in the passenger seat of one of the MARS-designated Beelze according to the 66th's habit of naming their vehicles after demons or monsters-as it rolled off the ramp, Nihlus and Vakarian behind their gunner. Kaidan echoed her position in the second MARS-designated Ninki-with Wrex and one of their comm specialists. The slower, more heavily armored Makos were soon sandwiched between the more lightly armored and maneuverable MARS. Each Mako had a designated crew of three, Goddard in one with their other comm specialist and three marines, while Williams and another three marines occupied the other.

The Mako which hadn't needed a designation until now and which Williams occupied had become Az; the other was Susan. From what she understood, the mother of Susan's mechanic had visited the platoon precisely once and left such a lasting impression that the IFV had been renamed immediately.

"Dropship incoming," Bram's voice warned.

"Devil One and Two, Tango's in the air, engage!" came Goddard's voice on the comms. The deep, heavy treads of their tires kicked dust into the air as the two IFVs swung clear of the shadow of the S-14s, their turrets swinging around to track the hovering dropship.

Eezo was used to dampen the recoil on starships, but it was too precious a resource to waste for AFVs, so she watched as even six wheels and independent suspension couldn't keep the vehicles from sliding back that half-inch as their cannons fired in almost perfect synchronicity. Recoil, however, was just another fact of life for Marines, like the need to breathe or eat. Their second shots struck as true as the first, exploding against the dropship's shields without the power to breach them.

"We have hostiles on the ground!"

"Be a shame to miss the party," Shepard said to her driver, who obligingly gunned the engine and put them into range, the other MARS mirroring their movements. Her gunner-Wilson, Earthborn out of Oklahoma-put on display skills that wouldn't have shamed an N-school graduate, the speed of the vehicle not offsetting the accuracy of the bullets that hammered into new geth-forms. If their foot soldiers mocked the upright, bipedal form of their creators, Shepard could only imagine that these quadrupeds existed in some flesh-and-blood form as well, simply without cannons fused into their necks.

The MARS were equipped with heavy machine guns and were more quick and maneuverable than the more heavily armored Makos, but it wasn't until the Lammergeiers got into the sky that the fight really started. Equipped for outings without further air support, they carried a rocket pod mounted on one wing and a missile bracket on the other.

"Screamers"-that was the popular nickname for the Banshee rockets that shrieked through the air, twisted metal fins producing a rifling effect as well as the noise that had scattered innumerable Batarian mercenaries. Those twisted fins not only increased the range and speed of the rockets, but once the initial volleys had disrupted the kinetic barriers, those tips could pierce all but the hardest of metals. Shepard watched with a grim sort of satisfaction as they latched onto the hull of the withdrawing dropship, their payloads erupting like flowers blooming in a timelapse photo.

Unfortunately it seemed that the geth took structural integrity seriously, because despite the two gaping holes that marred the sleek, insectoid shape of their ship, it was able to re-establish its shields and retreat. Shepard's eyes flickered back to the fight on the ground, but the Makos had dug their teeth deep into their new, smaller prey, opening up with both cannons and their coaxial guns until the geth shields were a memory and the geth steel was a twisted, smoking ruin.

"Should we pursue, Commander?" Bram asked as the last one's hydraulic system was failing, those thick, spider-like legs collapsing beneath its bulk.

"Negative," she retorted. "Let the Normandy deal with it, if she can. We still need to clear the colossi before we find the good doctor. "

"Then we'll go and give 'em hell when you give the word," Bram acknowledged, the S-14s remaining safely below the ridgeline.

Shepard pulled up the map on her omnitool as the vehicles fell into a convoy, the MARS fore and aft with the Makos snugged in between. She'd put them down close to the ruins of the Prothean city and with the guidance of recent satellite imaging, they were able to avoid any open lava flows, though the narrow, rocky valleys made for a rough journey through a desolate landscape. It was only in the population centers that there was an attempt to reintroduce the native plants and animals in controlled biospheres; otherwise the human settlers of the planet were content to enrich themselves by selling the plentiful metals offworld. The severe volcanic activity of the last three hundred years had thrown up ash clouds that had caused a mass extinction event, leaving them with bare, ugly basalt rolling by outside the windows.

And then they were in the mining operation-cum-archeological dig site, but it was filled with the quarian's AI attempt to make themselves obsolete. Just as the name implied, the colossi were colossal and would have presented enough of an obstacle on their own as they were scrambling the targeting systems aboard the S-14s, but they were well-supported by shock and rocket troops.

 _Funding apparently isn't an issue for a machine race,_ Shepard thought with a grim sort of amusement.

Her driver described the situation far more colorfully and vocally, demonstrating a particularly apt ability to use four-letter words as nouns, verbs, adjectives, _and_ adverbs. There was a clicking noise from the turians in the back-she couldn't interpret whether that was approval or disapproval and at the moment she didn't have space enough to care.

"There," she said sharply, activating her comm so that her orders would reach the other vehicles. "Entrance to the mine at three o'clock, heads up, lots of lovelies looking to spoil our day. Beelze, Ninki, let's say hello loud enough to clear the park so we can get out, stretch our legs. Once my team and Alenko's are in, let's get a citadel up, Williams. Devil One and Two, priority is the colossi shields-we wouldn't want to keep them from discovering whether or not geth go to hell when they die."

Confirmation came from all the feeds even as the four AFVs began evasive maneuvers to avoid the fire of the three colossi, accelerating and breaking out of formation as the advantage of overwhelming firepower belonged to the geth offensive. Unfortunately, the layout of the mining operation was against them-all the buildings and struts they could have used for additional cover were in the opposite direction of their entry point.

Moon-her driver-jerked the wheel sharply, the reinforced bar on the front of the MARS clipping a passing geth hard enough to sheer a huge chunk out of its torso. She had a feeling, judging by the teeth-baring smile on his face, that if they'd been equipped with tracks instead of tires she'd have been treated to a demonstration of vehicular slaughter.

Az and Susan had been hammering the Colossus closest to the mine entrance with everything they had and as Shepard caught the slight flicker of failing shields on the part of the mechanical behemoth, she watched as the reactive shielding on Susan consolidated itself into a nearly opaque barrier in the front of the vehicle.

"Is he-?" Vakarian asked, but he didn't have time to finish the thought before the driver of the Mako used the thrusters for an extra burst of speed that put them in front of the missile that the Colossus had launched and into a direct collision course with its legs. There was the grinding crunch of metal as the shield _slammed_ into a leg thick enough to be a steel girder-it was solid enough to act as a battering ram and circumvent the usual rules of kinetic shielding, though _hugely_ power-inefficient and if they weren't careful they'd lose shielding entirely-and then seconds later, like an echo, it hit a second leg.

Shepard was already pulling the damage feeds for Susan, but the Colossus was collapsing, its own shields down, and one of the S-14s rose just far enough above the ridgeline that it could get a lock-and then everything was metal shrapnel and smoke and discharged electricity as the S-14 put three missiles into the belly of the beast.

But the satisfaction of bringing one down was tempered by the warning lights that burned ominous red on Susan's damage report-they'd overloaded the shielding systems, which mean that at this moment the IFV was protected by nothing more than metal. She twisted in her seat to keep an eye on them, tense with the knowledge that even if the automatic systems brought the shielding back online, there'd be long, vulnerable seconds before that happened.

"Devil One's showing bare skin, we could use some cover over here," Goddard barked into the comm, which meant the line was open when there were three distinct metallic _tunks_ of something impacting the roof.

"Status?" Shepard demanded.

"Something new and exciting on the roof, ma'am," was Goddard's tense reply. "Rodriguez, are you waiting for an invitation?"

"No, ma'am!" A finely controlled blast of biotic power swept two of the new geth-forms from the roof of the Mako, while a second tore the third uninvited visitor from where it was clinging to the turret.

"They're in the mining superstructure like a bunch of fucking monkeys," Goddard reported, "dropped down on us when we passed beneath it."

Despite total shields failure, Susan and Az had turned their campaign of destruction on another of the colossi, while the heavy machine guns mounted atop the two MARS focused on thinning the ranks of the foot soldiers. She heard Nihlus hiss something too low for her to hear as they caught a rocket to one of the rear panels, making the vehicle fishtail wildly until Moon brought in back under control, sliding to a neat stop not ten feet from the mine entrance.

"Hope you've enjoyed your ride on the Beelzebub Express," Moon called after them as Shepard and the two turians made a quick exit. He gunned the engine as soon as the three of them were clear, the rhythmic discharge of the gun never faltering.

Vakarian automatically fell a step behind, turning to keep eyes on their 6 as she and Nihlus put down a few geth that hadn't quite realized they were dead yet. They'd crossed five feet of their ten-foot gap when Vakarian shouted, "Incoming!"

Shepard didn't glance behind her, because she could hear the distinctive whine of an incoming round. She pitched herself forward into a full sprint and when she met the incline that led down into the mine, which lacked most anything resembling cover, she pitched herself forward, one forearm in front of her face to keep her helmet from impacting the floor, the other tucking her rifle beneath her body moments after her chestpiece took the worst of the fall. Bruises faded, a damaged weapon in the field was death sentence.

It was a well-trained instinct, just as she'd guess Vakarian's was, because nanoseconds later his taller, _heavier_ body was thrown partially over her own right before the impact of the missile against the slanted roof of the mine. It dislodged a few heavy chunks of whatever they'd used to reinforce the tunnel, along with detritus from the missile itself, and the in-suit comms caught Vakarian's huff of pain, but sometime between initial impact and then he'd taken most of his weight onto his arms, which were braced on either side of her body. That sound was the only indication he'd been hit.

They stayed prone for a few seconds longer, but this shaft had been reinforced with seismic activity in mind. There was no further shifting and Shepard quickly grew impatient and worried in equal measure. "Vakarian?"

"Sorry, ma'am," he wheezed, the auto-filter feature of the comm having made his distress inaudible until that point. "Caught me in the back and winded me."

A movement in her peripheral vision resolved itself into Nihlus, who offered a three-fingered hand to Vakarian. Grasping forearms, they soon had Vakarian safely upright, but a new worry had burrowed itself in Shepard's mind as she rose to her own feet. She was accustomed to working with mixed gender teams and she had a very clear idea of what her upper limit was when it came to carrying someone clear of a combat zone. If either Vakarian or Nihlus were injured, it was going to fall to the other turian to get the other out. If they were both injured-well, she would pray for now and run scenarios later.

"Vakarian, as much as I appreciate the gesture, it's my prerogative to be crushed by my own rubble," Shepard told the turian, who flexed his mandibles sheepishly at her from behind his helmet.

"Habit, " he quipped. "You humans being so squishy and all."

Shepard snorted inelegantly as the other MARS offloaded its own cargo, Wrex bursting out of his door with a triumphant roar matched only by the blast of his shotgun. The Marine sliding out from the door opposite was wincing, so Shepard would guess that the krogan hadn't waited until the door was all the way open before displaying what the redundant lungs of a fully grown male krogan were capable of.

"Hearing still intact, Sokolov?"

"Dunno, ma'am. I'll let you know when the ringing stops."

Kaidan was fast on his heels as the MARS kicked up grit and ash when its driver gunned the vehicle back into the fight.

"I vote we leave the krogan behind," Nihlus murmured dryly. "It sounds like he's having fun and I'd hate to spoil that."

Shepard swallowed down her amusement. "Wrex, fall in!" she demanded sharply, which earned her an affirmative grunt in reply.

Kaidan and Nihlus took point, Wrex covering their rear, while she and Vakarian flanked Solokov, who periodically checked in with the surface team and the Normandy and tried to raise Dr. T'Soni on the common channels.

"I've never visited a Prothean ruin before," Vakarian commented as they swept the tunnels of the mining complex, Kaidan's barriers keeping them all relatively safe from the odd geth that they encountered. "Aside from the Citadel, I mean."

Shephard hummed her acknowledgment, but didn't pick up the conversational thread. She had no particular phobia of tunnels, but she'd hunted in enough of them to be leery of the lack of options if and when things started to go wrong. Their party reached the stairs without incident and made the moderate trek down to the lowest point-less than seventy feet, at an estimate.

"According to the mining company, we should be come out on a landing of sorts," Kaidan commented as they prepared to open the bottom set of doors. "They found a natural cavern and were preparing to use it as a kind of base camp for some deeper exploratory mining. That's when they stumbled onto the Prothean ruin. If Dr. T'Soni's down here, there are shelters in case of mining disasters. Food, water, air recycling systems, and walls designed to hold up against a mine collapse. If she made it to one of them and sealed herself in, she'll be fine."

"Sure," Wrex volunteered snidely. "All tucked up neat and tidy and eating little cakes while waiting for rescue. Because last time I checked, prescience wasn't something the asari had suddenly developed. No way does she get surprised by the geth and makes it back into this section of the mine."

"Gentlemen," Shepard said sharply, forestalling a brewing argument. "Sokolov, we still have contact?"

"Still coming in clear as day, ma'am," was his report. "No response to my hails either-Dr. T'Soni either has her omnitool off or we're going to enter a section of tunnels where we won't have reception."

"So it's not the rock," Shepard said thoughtfully. "She's in the Prothean section, then. Several of the researchers who worked in subterranean ruins reported the same phenomena; they hypothesized it had something to do with the coating on the walls. No incoming or outgoing signals."

"You could have mentioned this before," Nihlus observed with a sidelong glance.

"There was no guarantee it wasn't the mine. It's a natural property of some minerals."

Nihlus rumbled something back at her, but she couldn't sort out all the tones before they were entering the cavern and discovering that several geth had beaten them to it. Unlike the chaos above, these were more even odds, which made it a little unfair for the geth.

It was only when the sounds of gunfire were dying down that both her turians paused and tilted their heads in a very avian movement.

"Someone's shouting," Vakarian observed in the same moment that Nihlus took off in that ground-eating turian lope.

 _One day he's going to run into something he can't handle by himself,_ Shepard thought grimly as she signaled for her team to follow at a slightly more sedate pace.

Rough rock gave way to a manmade series of scaffolding that led to a wide service elevator on the left, which had seen the tromp of many dirty boots; to the right a newer series of scaffolding had been bolted into the rock. The featureless volcanic basalt of the surface had given way to striated layers of rock, but at the end of the walkway these gave way to gleaming tiled walls.

And it was in this tiled area that they discovered their target. One Dr. Liara T'Soni, who was suspended in a blue grav-shifted kinetic barrier like a dragonfly in amber.


End file.
